A Sweet View: The Making of an English Idyll 9781789144987, 1789144981

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Part I: The Picturesque and English Scenery, 1770–1860
1: The Picturesque and the Promotion of English Landscape
2: Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s ‘Genuine English Scenery’
3: The Domestication of Picturesque England, 1800–1860
Part II: Painting and Writing English Scenery
4: ‘Going-in-itiveness’: Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral
5: Myles Birket Foster and the Surrey Scene
6: Writing English Scenery: Richard Jefferies
Part III: ‘The Very Essence of England’
7: English Rural Scenery: A Repertoire
8: The Country Cottage
Epilogue: ‘A Haunt of Ancient Peace’
Notes and References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index of Persons and Pictures

Citation preview

A SWEET VIEW

A SWEET VIEW The Making of an English Idyll Malcolm Andrews

r ea ktion book s

For my family, past, present and to come, with love – and welcome Tristan!

Published by reaktion books ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2021 Copyright © Malcolm Andrews 2021 All rights reserved Published with support from the Marc Fitch Fund No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78914 498 7

Contents Preface  7

Part i The Picturesque and English Scenery, 1770–1860

1 The Picturesque and the Promotion of English Landscape  15 2 Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s ‘Genuine English Scenery’  49 3 The Domestication of Picturesque England, 1800–1860  87

Part ii Painting and Writing English Scenery 4 ‘Going-in-itiveness’: Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral  125 5 Myles Birket Foster and the Surrey Scene  167 6 Writing English Scenery: Richard Jefferies  203

Part iii ‘The Very Essence of England’ 7 English Rural Scenery: A Repertoire  235 8 The Country Cottage  277 Epilogue: ‘A Haunt of Ancient Peace’  303 Notes and References  313 Select Bibliography  336 Acknowledgements  338 Photo Acknowledgements  340 index OF PERSONS AND PICTURES  343

Preface

T

he phrase ‘a sweet view’ is taken from Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), as the heroine gazes at a landscape in one of the southern counties and muses fondly on its ‘English verdure, English culture, English comfort’. Emma was written during the last years of the Napoleonic Wars, a period when national identity in landscape terms needed a visible face. Over the ensuing century a distinctive repertoire of rural motifs evolved and then congealed into icons of Englishness – downland, farms, orchards, thatched cottages, village church spires, gently undulating meadows bordered with hedgerows. By the time of Emma’s centenary this pictured countryside was being summoned into national service; recruitment posters for the First World War displayed the imagery to represent the ‘country’ people were fighting for. Here is how one novelist of the time, H. G. Wells, presented it, with something of the same soft-focused fondness as in Emma’s gaze:

1 Detail of Myles Birket Foster, Lane Scene at Hambledon, c. 1862, watercolour on paper.

There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learned to love it; its firm yet gentle line of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient 7

a sweet view trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers, its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year . . . none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland. This paean to the English countryside comes near the opening of Wells’s novel The History of Mr Polly (1910). It conveys a sense of the native landscape as a finished work, a securely established and unique scene laid out for the pleasure of ‘those who have learned to love it’. Three of those who have learned to love it are Alfred Polly himself and his two friends – all three young men ‘doomed to toil behind counters . . . for the better part of their lives’. This doom meant that, as Wells put it, ‘they had no footing’ in the countryside through which they were walking. They were visitors, outsiders, all the more alert to what was different from their familiar domestic and working environment and thereby constructing their ‘English country-side’. The experience of these young men recapitulated the larger national experience over the course of the nineteenth century in England, as a predominantly rural population drifted from the countryside into the rapidly expanding towns and cities. People adapted to urban life, but as part of that necessary evolutionary process they had less and less direct experience of the rural world that continued, remotely, to supply their food, their cut flowers, their diminishingly clean air and water. Over time the countryside flattened into scenery for their leisure excursions. That two-dimensional countryside burgeoned in the canvases, photographs and illustrated books that lavished attention on an anthologized rural England. Now, two centuries on from Emma, English national identity has once again come into sharpened focus. Both Brexit and the 8

Preface

future of the United Kingdom’s internal union raise questions and challenge prejudices about England and Englishness. For those ‘who have learned to love it’, consciously or otherwise, English country scenery may well be requisitioned yet again in the quest for clarification of identity. A Sweet View is about that learning process. My fundamental aims are quite simple: to suggest an evolutionary account of the emergence in England of a certain rural idyll, partly by tracing the changing ideas of the picturesque in the nineteenth century; to listen with the reader to some of the most passionately engaged makers of that idyll; and to spend time with their paintings and word-pictures so as to understand more why they had such affective power. Part i is mainly historical. It explores the shaping of perceptions of English landscape scenery over the decades from the 1770s to (roughly) the 1850s, as that process links with developing ideas of the picturesque, the era’s cultural nationalism, the rise of feeling for ‘local attachment’ and the reaction to urbanization, industrialization and agricultural ‘improvement’. Part ii focuses on the work and careers of three figures who mediated versions of idyllic English rural scenery and contributed to giving it its distinctive character as idyll and reality: Samuel Palmer, Myles Birket Foster and Richard Jefferies. Part iii surveys the principal features of English countryside, predominantly its southern countryside, once its iconic character has been established in Victorian England: the village green, old pathways, gates and stiles, country church and churchyard, hedgerows – and, to conclude, the country cottage as a nexus of values associated with the changing ideas of Englishness. Surrey features prominently in this book. Three of my principal figures, Palmer, Foster and Jefferies, settled and worked in the county. The ‘chocolate-box’ imagery of cottage England for the Victorians was generated largely from the countryside around the Surrey villages of Witley and Sandhills, the homes 9

a sweet view of (respectively) Foster and Helen Allingham. The localization of this generic English rural idyll is important. When Mr Polly’s narrator declares ‘There is no country-side like the English country-side’, he makes a doubly contentious point. First, he asserts an English uniqueness among international competitors; second, he assumes English countryside is just a single identifiable entity, the English countryside, instead of a combination of many very different landscape profiles and personalities. That latter point has been articulated well by Paul Readman in Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity (2018). In studying different English landscapes, each with their own distinctive identities, Readman’s book takes for granted the cultural dominance of the South Country idyll as the traditional, conventional expression of Englishness in landscape, and seeks to articulate the claims of alternatives. ‘South Country’ is the name that Hilaire Belloc gave to Sussex and the South Downs. Edward Thomas’s book The South Country (1909) took the term and stretched it to cover the southern English counties from Kent westwards to Dorset. Mr Polly and his friends are supposed to be enjoying their country excursion in the regions of Hampshire and west Sussex. My own book is a study primarily of the making of that South Country landscape idyll (drawing mainly on Kent, Surrey and Sussex). South Country has strong personal associations for me, and that is one of the motives for writing this book. After the Second World War my grandfather, who worked in south London, bought an old farmhouse in the Surrey countryside. He drove daily through its lanes to and from work in his Camberwell office. The farmhouse (which lingers as an intensely romantic memory for this grandson) had a mighty old barn, filled in autumn and winter with soft-play mountains of hay squares. Its huge doors looked out across the wide cobbled yard to the family house. A wooden granary on stilts formed the third side of the yard. It was only two 10

Preface

miles or so from Foster’s Witley village and Allingham’s Sandhills hamlet. Grandfather Andrews bought into the idyll, just as Foster and Allingham had done when they moved into the area several generations earlier. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once remarked, ‘A painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thing and a thought.’ The same could be said of the English rural idyll that is the subject of this book – it lies somewhere between a thing and a thought. That ‘between’ opens quite a long gamut; sometimes it is just a dream, at other times the dream becomes nearly a reality out in the coun­ try­side. A Sweet View has been for me a way of haunting the English lanes and villages and country churchyards all over again, a journey taken through books and pictures and real places. It is a journey even more congenial in imagining the reader’s companionship.

11

Pa rt i The Picturesque and English Scenery, 1770–1860

One

The Picturesque and the Promotion of English Landscape It was a sweet view – sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive. Jane Austen, Emma (1816), Chapter 42

J

ane Austen’s heroine, Emma Woodhouse, is viewing Donwell Abbey, the country estate of Mr Knightley, the gentlemanly character she is eventually to marry. She warms to what she sees, just as her narrator seems to do in summarizing it as a scenic idyll of Englishness. The landscape becomes an index of the physical and moral qualities ascribed to the national identity, as the repetition of ‘English’ underlines: comfort, control, moderation (that mild bright sunshine). Here, in more detail, is what Emma’s gaze was absorbing:

2 Detail of William Havell, Tintern Abbey, 1804, oil on canvas.

She viewed the respectable size and style of the building, its suitable, becoming characteristic situation, low and sheltered – its ample gardens stretching down to meadows washed by a stream, of which the Abbey, with all the old neglect of prospect, had scarcely a sight – and its abundance of timber in rows and avenues, which neither fashion nor extravagance had rooted up . . . The considerable slope, at nearly the foot 15

a sweet view of which the Abbey stood, gradually acquired a steeper form beyond its grounds; and at half a mile distant was a bank of considerable abruptness and grandeur, well clothed with wood; – and at the bottom of this bank, favourably placed and sheltered, rose the Abbey-Mill Farm, with meadows in front, and the river making a close and handsome curve around it. I want to linger a while before this view. Emma’s rhapsodic response gives my book its title, and as the portrait of the house and landscape of Donwell is amplified over these paragraphs certain features come into focus that bear on the undertaking of this book. First, some of the terms themselves. What about that word ‘sweet’? In our usage today ‘sweet’ has acquired a lot more sugar. It hovers on the edge of suggesting something cloyingly cute, probably petite too. In Jane Austen’s time it certainly had that meaning of honey-sweet on the palate, but it also applied more broadly, as when we describe someone as ‘sweet-tempered’. In one of her letters Austen describes the delightful prospect of a journey into Kent with her brother as ‘a very sweet scheme’. That is the sense in which she uses it here in Emma, as the object of her heroine’s gaze stirs benign feelings. The sweet view is not yet the ‘chocolate-box’ view. The Donwell landscape is welcomed as a product of English ‘culture’. The term ‘culture’ here fuses the human and the environ­ mental. In Austen it could denote both the managed landscape (as in horticulture) and a person’s social and moral education (a cul­ tivated individual). Earlier in Emma, a character’s upbringing is described thus: ‘Living constantly with right-minded and wellinformed people, her heart and understanding had received every advantage of discipline and culture’ (ch. 20). The Donwell estate has also had ‘every advantage of discipline and culture’; that is one reason why for Emma and her narrator it exudes ‘comfort’. 16

The Picturesque and English Scenery

‘English verdure, English culture, English comfort’: this is a significant sequence. Verdure is the countenance of the raw ma­terial; subjected to the ‘right-minded’ discipline and culture, that natural asset is processed into a comfortable and specifically ‘English’ locus amoenus – Donwell Abbey’s house and grounds. The house and its land are construed as manifestations of English naturalness and sincerity (it ‘looked what it was’, without any pretensions), and as a reflection of their owner. Mr Knightley is a man of exemplary modesty and integrity, and his gentlemanly values (a product of English culture) are externalized in his estate and home. The house is not an off-the-peg designer mansion, for instance in the fashionable imported Palladian style; it seems to have grown over time in a natural way, shaped by its changing dom­­estic needs – ‘rambling and irregular, with many comfortable and one or two handsome rooms . . . just what it ought to be, and it looked what it was’ (ch. 42). This touches on what would become a familiar Victorian prejudice in favour of an apparently organic ancient architecture that was content with its irregularity – a point made explicitly by the late Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies: Our old English folk [liked their rooms to be] of many shapes, and not at right angles in the corners, not all on the same dead level of flooring . . . each part of the house had its individuality. To these houses life fitted itself and grew to them; they were not mere walls, but became part of existence. A man’s house was not only his castle, a man’s house was himself. Jefferies’s description epitomizes the English picturesque. The house defies rule-and-line regularity and smoothness; it expresses a quirky individuality; it is a reassuring image of continuity with Old England. ‘A man’s house was himself’: Mr Knightley’s house is very much ‘himself’, not a showpiece for visiting sightseers 17

a sweet view

(illus. 3). So are his grounds. They resist fashionable taste with their ‘old neglect of prospect’ (that is to say, their neglect of managed vistas, eye-catchers and so on), and they repudiate extravagance by the attentive husbanding of timber. Knightley’s surname implies his embodiment of the finest English qualities, and his first name, George, associates him with England’s patron saint. His championship of the values associated with Englishness is made even clearer by his criticism of the character of his ostensible rival in Emma’s affections, Frank Churchill. When (in ch. 18) Emma declares herself delighted by Churchill’s easy charm, Knightley checks her enthusiasm: ‘No, Emma; your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English. He may be very “aimable”, have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people – nothing really amiable about him.’ Frank, whose first name hints at French affiliations, is the fascinating newcomer 18

3 Thomas Rowlandson, The Country House, c. 1800, watercolour over traces of black chalk on paper.

The Picturesque and English Scenery

to the traditional English village of Highbury – and he is not at all ‘frank’. ‘George’ vs ‘Frank’ is a resonant opposition, given that England was at war with France at the time of Emma’s writing. Churchill’s presence in the village is the cue for airing contemporary English prejudices about the artificial glamour of French manners, suspected frequently of concealing fundamental deceitfulness.That is the gist of Knightley’s reproach: English ‘amiable’ versus French aimable. The appropriation of ‘English’ for Emma’s particular sweet view would have been contested. Was Donwell’s sweet view necessarily representative of the national landscape? Charlotte Brontë read Pride and Prejudice and responded to Austen’s world from her home on the Yorkshire moors. She found the book’s version of ‘English culture’ to be ‘a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers – but . . . no open country & no fresh air – no blue hill – no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.’ Brontë recoils from such a constricted version of what ‘English’ denoted. Rightly so; there are many different regional landscapes within England that have always had their own claims to iconic national representativeness, their own identity-forming histories, as Paul Readman’s Storied Ground (2018) has eloquently argued. Nonetheless, it was just that gardened appearance of England’s countryside that came to be seen by many later in the century as its national hallmark. ‘Foreigners are always struck with the garden-like aspect of England,’ remarked William Howitt in his compendious Rural Life of England (1838), anticipating Ralph Waldo Emerson’s description: ‘England is a garden . . . Under an ash-colored sky, the fields have been combed and rolled till they appear to have been finished with a pencil instead of a plough.’Emma plays out many of the fomenting cultural prejudices of the late eighteenth century and Regency in constituting the components of the national character and relating them to the 19

a sweet view landscape. The so-called relational construction of identity helps to focus what is going on. The theory proposes that identity may be defined as much by emphasizing what the subject is not, as it is by emphasizing what he or she is: that is to say, it is constructed by selective exclusion of characteristics as much (if not more) as it is by accretion. In the tactics of Emma’s gentlemanly spokesman for Englishness, the characteristics disliked by the English could be conveniently pooled and projected on to the demonized French so as to constitute their national identity. Thus English manners are natural, and French artificial. This process was formative for establishing conventions for the English moral character, as historians have long pointed out. Gerald Newman’s densely documented cultural history The Rise of English Nationalism (1987) concentrates precisely on this period in arguing his case: ‘To be truly English was to live up to a stereotype generated in anti-Frenchness.’ This relational construct could be extended to aesthetic tastes, as Kay Dian Kriz has shown in her study of the rise of the English school of painters in the early nineteenth century. It also shaped movements in landscape gardening in the late eighteenth century, and the production of the English countryside idyll in Victorian representations. Writing in the 1790s, in the wake of the violent upheavals of the French Revolution, the garden designer Humphry Repton asserted a relationship between the character of the English constitution and the nation’s horticul­ ture: ‘The neatness, simplicity, and elegance of English gardening, have acquired the approbation of the present century, as the happy medium betwixt the wildness of nature and the stiffness of art; in the same manner as in the English constitution is the happy medium betwixt the liberty of savages, and the restraint of despotic government.’ The hostility to French influence changed over the years following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. ‘We no longer hate the French,’ proclaimed Edward Lytton Bulwer in a burst of italicized triumph when he dedicated Book i of his England and the English 20

The Picturesque and English Scenery

(1833) to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord.By the middle and later nineteenth century the picturesque English landscape idyll is constructed no longer in opposition to French models but more in reaction against mass urbanization and, to some extent, the land transformations effected by parliamentary enclosures and modernized farming practices. That qualification ‘to some extent’ reflects the complexity of responses, particularly to the enclosure landscapes. William Hazlitt in 1827 reflected on the benefits to the national character of England’s residual cultural hostility to the French: ‘for the spirit of contradiction alone to foreign fop­ peries and absurdities keeps us within some bounds of decency and order’. That sentiment, light-hearted though it is, has a distinctly Victorian ring in welcoming ‘bounds of decency and order’. But it makes us aware that while some voices were loud against enclosure’s brutal imposition of an imprisoning rectilinear grid on the open, rolling landscape, for others it reinforced a distinctively English fondness for small-scale contained spaces, even for ‘bounds’ and ‘order’. As the hundreds of miles of raw new hawthorn boundary lines matured and thickened into hedgerows, diversified botanically and had their regular contours relieved by sprouting trees, that patchwork of fields enclosed by parliamentary Acts naturalized into snug spaces, so appealing to an English fondness for cosy domestication of the natural environment (‘English comfort’). The growing attractions of contained spaces – enclosures as well as garden spaces – are explored in Rachel Crawford’s Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700–1830 (2002), in which she argues for a new aesthetics of space associated with Englishness: ‘The notion of Eden . . . becomes identified with a system of vernacular enclosures rather than the open prospect of the country gentleman.’ The picturesque emphasis on foregrounds, and not the raised viewpoint, promoted by William Gilpin in his discussion of landscape aesthetics, accords with this favouring of 21

a sweet view more enclosed spaces. In his absorbing study Common Land in English Painting, 1700–1850 (2012), Ian Waites has drawn attention to Edmund Burke’s harnessing of anti-Frenchness in an interesting metaphorical play on national landscape partialities. In the third of his Letters on the ‘Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Direc­tory of France’ (1796–7) Burke conjures the image of ‘the waste expanse, and boundless, barren ocean of the homicide philanthropy of France’, compared with England’s ‘little quiet rivulets, that watered an humble, a contracted, but not an unfruitful field’. Waites suggests that this rhetorical appeal to English landscape sentiments, where all is ‘little’, ‘quiet’, ‘humble’, is designed as a ‘com­­­­­­­forting metaphor against the dangerous, radical politics of the time’. It is worth adding that in Burke’s aesthetic system, smallness was one of the primary constituents of beauty. Note also the inclusion of ‘contracted’ as a distinctive asset. As Waites remarks, this emphasis promoted ‘the socially and culturally acceptable, and instantly “trad­itional” image of England and Englishness – a “patchwork” of small enclosed fields surrounded by verdant hedgerows that remain with us today’. That patchwork was cherished by the poet William Cowper. His long poem The Task (1785; a favourite of Jane Austen’s) eulogizes small-scale home scenes, ‘snug enclosures in the shelter’d vale,/ Where frequent hedges intercept the eye’. Almost exactly a century after Emma, it was the ‘sweet view’, composed of cosily enclosed fields, that exercised the most powerful sentimental pull for recruitment to the armed services in the First World War. ‘Isn’t this worth fighting for?’ demanded the call­ up poster (illus. 4), as it displayed a landscape 22

4 ‘Your Country’s Call. Isn’t this worth fighting for? Enlist Now’, 1915, chromolithograph recruiting poster, published as Number 87 by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee.

The Picturesque and English Scenery

of cottage homes and gardens and the trim fields piling up in undulating cushions of ‘English comfort’. The rolling hills are worn smooth to make lush pasture and arable land accommodating for livestock and plough; fields are neatly partitioned by hedgerows of uneven growth; cottages nestle in the folds, embowered by larger trees, their gardens tended. Formal affinities link the various natural and artificial components; the softly rounded thatch roofs echo the rolling contours of the hills, and the sheltering trees billow gently like the clouds above. This is how Emma’s ‘English culture’ looks when it has expanded from the sweet view of a cultivated private estate into an iconized image of England’s countryside; ‘a landscape whose features have been moulded in liberty, whose every winding lane is an expression of our national character’. So wrote the art historian Herbert Read in 1941. A similar identification was made in 1930 in a lecture by David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, on ‘The Personality of English Scenery’: English scenery . . . is not turbulent or despotic. It resembles ourselves in being sober, consistent, and staunch. Intimacy is its ruling characteristic . . . And our landscape is unostentatious. Its beauty is not revealed to the casual wayfarer . . . how English our landscape is, how well bred! It is the most English thing we possess, the most genuine and national. We ourselves represent the fusion of varied race and ideals and language, indeed, we may say that the land of England is the only real English thing in the world. Rather like Repton’s complacent description of English gardening’s ‘happy medium’ condition, Lindsay’s stress on the national landscape’s admirable sobriety and good breeding makes it sound as if its ‘English culture’ had been formed at a good public school.

23

a sweet view

Promoting English scenery How did it come about that English landscape scenery could be thought of as ‘the most genuine and national’? Note that, paradoxically, one of English countryside’s most conspicuous virtues appears to be that it is ‘unostentatious’. (Charles Dickens’s blustering, jingoistic character Mr Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend boasts to his French dinner guest that one of the Englishman’s greatest qualities was his ‘modesty’.) Unostentatiousness is the English marker of good breeding, for both Mr Knightley and David Lindsay. But even for those careless of gentlemanly values, the modest nature of the English landscape’s attractions had to be acknowledged: ‘This unromantic, uneventful-looking land of England’, William Morris called his beloved homeland in 1877 – ‘neither prison nor palace, but a decent home’. In late Georgian England there was much less acquiescence in such an emphatically humble image of the national landscape. The pressure to establish the high value of English rural scenery and to give it a national feel was part of that rising nationalism mentioned earlier. The impetus coincided with the new vogue for scenic tourism in Britain, which Robert Southey recalled in 1807: Within the last thirty years a taste for the picturesque has sprung up; and a course of summer travelling is now looked upon to be essential . . . While one of the flocks of fashion migrates to the sea-coast, another flies off to the mountains of Wales, to the lakes in the northern provinces, or to Scotland; some to mineralogize, some to botanize, some to take views of the country, – all to study the picturesque, a new science for which a new language has been formed, and for which the English have discovered a new sense in themselves, which assuredly was not possessed by their fathers.

24

The Picturesque and English Scenery

While this enthusiastic search for picturesque landscapes represented a new interest for the British in the scenery of their country, the nationalistic impetus was somewhat counteracted by another aspect of picturesque practice, its deference in matters of landscape taste to foreign models of landscape beauty. The picturesque in its simple infancy was little more than a matter of comparing real landscape scenery with idealized painted models, usually works by the seventeenth-century Mediterranean painters Claude Lorrain and the Poussins. In pursuit of this ‘new science’, the tourist-artist headed off to the Lakes or north Wales, equipped with some knowledge of the works of the classical landscape masters, and then ‘in imagination adapts to this standard the scenery which he expects to behold’, as one tourist put it. William Gilpin, the man credited with more or less initiating picturesque tourism, formulated the practice as a matter ‘of adapting the description of natural scenery to the principles of artificial landscape; and of opening the sources of those pleasures, which are derived from the comparison’. Thus the merits of British scenes were judged by the degree to which they approximated in formal terms to the higher aesthetic authority of the Claudean ‘artificial landscape’. That meant subordinating the value of native, vernacular scenery to foreign ideals and classical templates. Jingoistic English tourists in search of the authentic picturesque in Britain might well boast of landscape beauties in the Lakes or north Wales that outdid anything that Italy could offer. But at the same time, with Gilpin’s connoisseurial prescriptions in mind, they were busy in their sketchbooks Claudeanizing this native scenery – introducing graceful repoussoir trees, finding a handsome ruin to adorn the middle distance, and floating improbably azure Mediterranean skies above it all (illus. 5, 6). The promotion of British scenery needed more than shrill assertions of cultural independence from foreign aesthetic authorities and academic traditions. Those influences needed 25

a sweet view peeling away little by little. This induced a propagandist programme of English exceptionalism. One slight symptom of the contemporary de-classicizing and vernacularizing of the British tourist’s practices came with Gilpin’s popular and pioneering book Observations on the River Wye . . . Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (which appeared in five editions between its original publication in 1782 and 1800). In the first edition Gilpin practised the literary equivalent of Claudeanizing English scenes by quoting from Virgil’s Aeneid and Eclogues in the original Latin where he felt the Wye scenery rose to match such dignified classical settings. The second edition introduced English translations. The move recognized that a new breed of tourist was replacing the classically educated Grand Tourist, and that these new tourists were invoking British poetic models of landscape in their journals, quoting lines from James Thomson’s Seasons,

5 Detail of John Varley, Landscape with Harlech Castle, and Snowdon in the Background, n.d., watercolour.

26

The Picturesque and English Scenery 6 Richard Earlom, after Claude Lorrain, ‘A Herdsman Tending Cattle’, 1775, etching and mezzotint, plate no. 101 from Liber Veritatis, vol. ii (1777).

or John Milton’s L’Allegro, or Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village. Some contemporary poets were beginning to focus much more closely on specific features of English countryside that didn’t fit the classical landscape canon. John Scott’s Amwell: A Descriptive Poem was published in 1776. Scott’s home village of Amwell in Hertfordshire is described at some length and in some detail. In this poem the picturesque is now attached not to a majestic landscape with imposing ancient ruins (as in Havell’s romantic portrait of Tintern Abbey, illus. 2) but to a miscellaneous inventory of vernacular scenes and objects – very much a foretaste of the English idyll cherished by the Victorians: How picturesque The slender group of airy elm, the clump Of pollard oak, or ash, with ivy brown Entwin’d; the walnut’s gloomy breadth of boughs, The orchard’s ancient fence of mossy pales, 27

a sweet view 7 George Smith, Hop Pickers outside a Cottage, mid-18th century, oil on canvas.

The hay-stack’s dusky cone; the elder-shaded cot, Whose white-wash’d gable prominent thro’ green Of waving branches shows . . . the wall with mantling vines O’erspread, the porch with climbing woodbine wreath’d. (ll. 292–300)

Scott catches that distinctive blend of unobtrusive cultivation of the natural vegetation (the pollard oak) and its reverse process, the naturalizing of built structures (the mossy pales, the cottage clad with vines and woodbine). These are variations on the theme of the domesticated wild, an oxymoron (related to Repton’s compromise formula, ‘the happy medium betwixt the wildness of nature and the stiffness of art’) that was to become intrinsic to an English identity in rural scenery. British artists contemporary with these poets were more diffident in fully engaging the same native subjects. Why had England’s rural scenery been so starved of attention by its painters? – so Horace Walpole demanded in the 1760s:

28

The Picturesque and English Scenery

In a country so profusely beautified with the amenities of nature, it is extraordinary that we have produced so few good painters of landscape. As our poets warm their imaginations with sunny hills, or sigh after grottoes and cooling breezes, our painters draw rocks and precipices and castellated mountains, because Virgil gasped for breath at Naples, and Salvator wandered amidst Alps and Apennines. Our ever-verdant lawns, rich vales, fields of haycocks, and hop-grounds, are neglected as homely and familiar objects. A rare contemporary example of just such a ‘homely’ hop-ground scene, with thatched cottage, can be seen in George Smith’s landscape (illus. 7). Walpole’s complaints about the neglect of familiar English scenes come in his two paragraphs on the artist George Lambert, who had indeed painted a landscape of ‘rich vales’ in his View of Box Hill, Surrey (1733) (illus. 8). Box Hill and its surrounding Surrey landscape was a celebrated scenic site by the time Walpole was issuing his encouragement to painters (and it was the location chosen for a momentous picnic in Emma). Thomas Sandby’s watercolour painting of the hill in c. 1775 as seen from Norbury Park (illus. 9) was owned by Norbury’s proprietor, the art collector William Lock. Lock exploited this view from his grand house at Norbury Park by designing one of his rooms to take pictorial advantage of it. The room’s walls were painted on three sides with glowing idealized landscapes and tree-framed vistas, all suffused in a late afternoon light. The south-facing fourth wall with its large windows opened the real view towards Box Hill. Thus English topography was assimilated into a grand idealized landscape idiom, and fitted to take its place with the art of a connoisseur’s country mansion. Lock’s initiative was one way of meeting the challenge facing those artists rallied by Walpole. But they were also up against 29

a sweet view

prejudice about the lowly status of landscape itself as a genre (let alone English landscape) in the hierarchy of genres fostered by the Royal Academy. ‘Landscape painting has been considered as the lowest branch of the art,’ wrote Joseph Pott resentfully in his Essay on Landscape Painting (1783). Claude and the Poussins, exceptionally, were academically respected because they could bestow ‘intellectual dignity’ on their classical landscapes, partly by making them stages for historical episodes. The reluctance of the Academy to give landscape portraits of English subjects the degree of institutional exposure and encouragement called for by Walpole and others – and indeed by the market over the next few decades – clearly provoked hostility. A particularly virulent 30

8 George Lambert, A View of Box Hill, Surrey, 1733, oil on canvas. 9 Thomas Sandby, A View of Boxhill from Norbury Park, Surrey, c. 1775, watercolour, pen and grey ink, and graphite.

The Picturesque and English Scenery

10 Pietro Antonio Martini, The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1 July 1787, etching.

attack appeared in the New Monthly Magazine in 1833, ‘The Royal Academy Exposed’. It castigated the Academy as ‘an establishment assuming merits that do not belong to it, and exercising a harassing tyranny over the profession it pretends to foster’. The writer argued that the fact that most of the best contemporary British artists had not been Academy-educated proved that now ‘the establishment is worse than useless . . . In Landscape painting, Doctor [Thomas] Monro, of the Adelphi, did more to advance the art than any academy in Europe: under his direction, Turner, [Thomas] Girtin, and [John] Varley acquired style and taste.’ In addition to these young luminaries, Monro in the 1790s and early 1800s also patronized the painters Thomas Hearne, Peter De Wint and John Sell Cotman. In his alternative academy, almost single-handedly, Monro promoted the flower of British water­ colourists into their careers.

31

a sweet view In fact, the Academy had been displaying a fair proportion of landscape paintings over the previous half-century; from the 1780s onwards landscape subjects constituted nearly a third of each exhibition. We can see this in Martini’s print of the Academy exhibition of 1787 (illus. 10), where the landscape subjects are nearly all hung on the line. But how many of these landscape oils were of British scenery? To what extent did ‘home scenery’ (as it came to be called) feature within these statistics? By the turn of the century this category of subject was more likely to be found in the growing market for watercolours than in established exhibition oil paintings. The Society of Painters in Water-colours was established in 1804 and the New Society of Painters in Miniature and Water-colours in 1807. Their first exhibitions were dominated by landscapes. The Associated Artists in Watercolours held their first exhibition in 1808. The ascendancy of landscape as a popular genre, promoted by the output in English watercolour painting, is evident in the Microcosm of London’s illustration (illus. 11). In the Bond Street gallery exhibition of the new

11 Thomas Rowlandson, Exhibition of Water Coloured Drawings, Old Bond Street, 1 September 1808, hand-coloured etching and aquatint.

32

The Picturesque and English Scenery

12 Thomas Hearne, Raglan Castle, Monmouthshire, c. 1794, watercolour over pen and sepia ink.

Society of Painters in Water-colours, it is hard to find anything other than landscapes. One of the most articulate early challenges to Academy orthodoxy came in J. T. Smith’s Remarks on Rural Scenery (1797): Of all pictoresque [sic] subjects, the English cottage seems to have obtained the least share of particular notice and appropriate discriminations by modern tourists: Palaces, castles, churches, monastic ruins, and the remains, and even vestiges and conjectural situations, of our ancient feudal and ecclesiastical structures, have been elaborately, and indeed very interestingly described, with all their characteristic distinctions, while the objects comprehended by the term cottage scenery have by no means been honored with equal attention: and this, it should seem, merely because, though of equal 33

a sweet view excellence in the scale of pictoresque beauty, that beauty happens not to be of the heroic or sublime order. It seems not to have been sufficiently considered that the landscape-painter’s beauty does not necessarily exist in grandeur, exclusively or alone; but equally pervading every department of Nature, is found not less perfect in the most humble than in the most stately structures, or scenery. Thomas Hearne’s Raglan Castle (illus. 12) of a few years before seems almost to make the same point in graphic form. The detailed and populous cottage scene in the warmly lit foreground is set against the silhouette of the castle now emptied of life and fading away in the picture. Academy prejudices aside, there were, for the artist-tourists, more intrinsic disadvantages in their home landscapes, notably Britain’s deficiency in serene azure skies of the kind familiar in Claude’s landscapes. One fine Welsh scene, according to a tourist account in 1775, ‘seems to want nothing, but fine weather and a serene sky, to afford as rich studies as the neighbourhood of Tivoli or Frescati’. Adding to this problem was the slur from foreign critics on the British climate and its disabling effect on her artists, even to the point of suggesting an inferiority of character in the British that disqualified them for such work. It was a prejudice to some extent absorbed by the British cultural elite. The Abbé du Bos, Montesquieu and Johann Joachim Winckelmann were the foremost among those eminent critics who were ‘in the habit of indulging their sarcastic reflections upon the climate, and the ca­­pa­­ c­­ity of our people’. So wrote James Barry, professor of painting at the Royal Academy at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and he devoted much effort to rebuffing such demeaning remarks. These entrenched prejudices against the national climate and the limited ‘capacity’ of the English were recalled in the late 1840s by the Irish artist and art historian William Benjamin Sarsfield Taylor: 34

The Picturesque and English Scenery

What was still more difficult to combat with success [was] the unjust and unnatural prejudice which then reigned paramount in England chiefly among the higher, and of course more influential classes of society, namely, that the British people were mentally disqualified by nature and their climate from producing works of even ordinary merit in the arts, and wholly incapable from intellectual inferiority to succeed in representing any of the grander and loftier movements of the historic or poetic mood . . . here was a barrier for English genius to climb over. Taylor rails against the ‘Continental charlatans and sycophants . . . imported, to insult the native artists . . . the true cause why the arts have been so backward in Britain’. By the time he was writing, such prejudice had largely been overcome, but it was certainly felt by earlier generations of artists. Britain’s allegedly disabling climate and disturbed skies were eventually converted to a positive national advantage. This point was made by Leigh Hunt in an article on the state of the arts in England in 1810: ‘Winckelmann, who saw in our humid climate nothing but barrenness of taste, might have condescended to inform himself that such climates are essentially favourable to two branches of art, – Landscape-painting and Architecture. The former it supplies with scenes of perpetual verdure.’ This is the precious ‘English verdure’ registered in Emma’s sweet view of Donwell Abbey and acclaimed as a distinctly national asset. Notwithstanding the Royal Academy’s distaste for the genre, Dutch landscapes attracted increasingly popular interest. This was reflected in Thomas Gainsborough’s landscape idiom as well as in John Constable’s early enthusiasm for such scenery; this latter, as we shall see in the next chapter, was thanks to J. T. Smith’s mentoring of the young artist and providing him with many prints of Dutch landscapes. England’s skies and cloudscapes 35

a sweet view may have lacked the serene glow of Claude’s landscapes, but they introduced something in which she could claim to outdo Italy. Joseph Pott’s Essay devoted a chapter to ‘Hints for forming the taste of an English School’. There he called attention to the great but neglected merits of English scenery, including its ‘beautiful verdure’, the variety and richness of its trees, and – as a singular advantage over Italy itself – ‘the great variety and beauty of our northern skies; the forms of which are often so lovely and magnificent, where so much action is seen in the rolling of the clouds: all this is nearly unknown to the placid southern hemisphere’ (illus. 13). Such atmospheric changefulness and the drama of light it generated for the landscape became markers of the country’s identity, something almost to boast about, especially in the postwar years. J.M.W. Turner eulogized Britain’s variable climate ‘where all the vapoury turbulence involves the face of things, where nature seems to sport in all her dignity . . . dispensing incidents for the artist’s study’; he also declared that the loveliest skies to be seen in Europe were over Kent’s Isle of Thanet. William Henry Pyne, one of the founders of the Society of Painters in Water-colours, remarked in 1823 that such sky and cloud effects in the hands of watercolourists produced ‘compositions of the English school, which combine more poetic sentiment, and picturesque expression, than are to be found in the works of the ancient masters’. The distinctive changefulness and variety of English skies were replicated in the configurations of her landscape. England’s scenic variety was addressed in Gilpin’s second book of Obser­ vations, drawn from his tour of the lakes and mountains of Cumberland and Westmorland (published in 1786, it was in its fourth edition by 1808). The great success of his Wye Observations three or four years earlier probably made him reflect more analytically on the distinctive nature of the English scenery that was the subject of his picturesque prescriptions. At any rate, that is 36

The Picturesque and English Scenery

what he provided for readers of his new book. Near the opening he set out what he regarded as the cardinal features of English scenery, both natural and artificial, as well as the effects on English views of the country’s distinctive climate. He started, as so many commentators did in this period, by situating England in relation to its aesthetic competitors in Europe, and then he isolated the quality he believed to be unique to his country – its variety:

13 Joseph Wright of Derby, Derwent Water, with Skiddaw in the Distance, 1795–6, oil on canvas.

In some or other of the particular species of landscape, it may probably be excelled. Switzerland may perhaps exceed it in the beauty of its wooded vallies; Germany, in its river-views; and Italy, in its lake-scenes. But if it yield to some of these countries in particular beauties; I should suppose, that on the whole, it transcends them all. It exhibits perhaps more variety of hill, and dale, and level ground, than is any where to be

37

a sweet view seen in so small a compass. Its rivers assume every character, diffusive, winding and rapid. Its estuaries, and coast-views are varied, of course, from the form, and rockiness of its shores. Its mountains, and lakes, tho they cannot perhaps rival, as I have just observed, some of the choice lakes of Italy – about Tivoli, especially, where the most perfect models of this kind of landscape are said to be presented; are yet in variety, I presume, equal to the lake-scenery of any country. England’s concentrated variety remained a distinguishing mark of its country scenery through the nineteenth century and beyond, whenever generalized assessments were offered. I have already (in the Preface) quoted the narrator of The History of Mr Polly: ‘Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year . . . none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland.’ In 1964 the geographers David Lowenthal and Hugh Prince tried to establish in a fairly systematic way the dominant visual qualities of the English landscape. Their first aesthetic category was variety: ‘Few English views do not afford a glimpse of contrasting scenery.’ This effect is, so they argue, ‘enhanced by the intricacy of the paths leading through the landscape’: ‘A maze of roads and boundaries twist and turn to reveal a succession of new vistas, now near, now distant; each turning confronts the traveller with sudden breaks in slope, changes in vegetation and land use, contrasts in the man-made landscape between features created at various times in the past.’ This experience of variety within a single view as well as in the succession of views would have become intensified for the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century tourists simply as a result of the accelerated pace of travel afforded by improved roads and a wider range of light vehicles. Tourists took to their chaises for summer excursions 38

The Picturesque and English Scenery

and ‘did’ the tour of the Lakes with the aim of taking in as many of the famous picturesque sights as possible during the time allotted for their holiday, thereby intensifying the sense of a rich and vivifying variety of scenery. This touring process, adopted as it was by a largely urbanized people, also intensified the experience of unfamiliar countryside as scenery, a succession of views, primarily for aesthetic consumption. One distinctive contributor to this vaunted variety, according to Gilpin, was the characteristically English pattern of mixed wood­­ land, hedges and fields, ‘found oftener in English landscape, than in the landscape of other countries’: In France, in Italy, in Spain, and in most other places, cultivation, and wood have their separate limits. Trees grow in detached woods; and cultivation occupies vast, unbounded common fields. But in England, the custom of dividing property by hedges, and of planting hedge-rows, so universally prevails, that almost wherever you have cultivation, there also you have wood. In Gilpin’s time these hedgerows incorporated more trees than ever before. Then, from about 1870 until the middle of the twentieth century, hedgerow trees more than doubled; by the 1960s it was estimated that between a third and a quarter of all England’s timber stood in scattered hedgerows and in parks. This juxtaposition of wood and cultivation ensured variety, as Gilpin argued, but, because of the formality of hedge-planting, the landscape needed some visual manipulation if it was to satisfy the picturesque connoisseur, for whom rectilinearity must be suppressed or at least smudged: Now altho this regular intermixture produces often deformity on the nearer grounds; yet, at a distance it is the source of great 39

a sweet view beauty. On the spot, no doubt, and even in the first distances, the marks of the spade, and the plough; the hedge, and the ditch; together with all the formalities of hedge-row trees, and square divisions of property, are disgusting in a high degree. But when all these regular forms are softened by distance – when hedge-row trees begin to unite, and lengthen into streaks along the horizon – when farm-houses, and ordinary buildings lose all their vulgarity of shape, and are scattered about, in formless spots, through the several parts of a distance – it is inconceivable what richness, and beauty, this mass of deformity, when melted together, adds to landscape . . . Thus English landscape affords a species of rich distance, which is rarely to be found in any other country. The gradual uniting of hedgerow trees described by Gilpin can be seen in George Vicat Cole’s Harvest Time (illus. 14), where the corduroy formality of the foreground cornfield’s lines and the rectangular middle-distance fields give way to the recessional melting of all boundaries into a green wooded mass. Rich distances, varied foregrounds, constantly changing skyscapes: recognition of England’s landscape assets accumulated steadily as Gilpin and others worked hard to bring their distinctiveness into focus. Gilpin closes this part of his discussion with a little tip for the artist who might be missing the statutory coulisses: ‘You have likewise from this intermixture of wood and cultivation, the advantage of being sure to find a tree or two, on the foreground, to adorn any beautiful view you may meet with in the distance.’ The enhancement of the varied view by England’s atmospheric humidity became a hallmark of the character of English rural scenery more broadly, impressing itself on many foreigners visiting the country for the first time. Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York’s Central Park, came to England in the spring of 1850, and rhapsodized about the effects of its humidity: ‘Such a 40

The Picturesque and English Scenery 14 George Vicat Cole, Harvest Time, 1865, watercolour and gouache.

country! – green, dripping, glistening, gorgeous!’ he exclaimed. ‘English May – sunny, leafy, blooming May – in an English lane; with hedges, English hedges, hawthorn hedges, all in blossom; homely old farm-houses, quaint stables, and haystacks; the old church spire over the distant trees; the mild sun beaming through the watery atmosphere, and all so quiet.’ The watery atmosphere also produced the haziness cherished by Gilpin: that ‘thin, dubious veil, which is often beautifully spread over landscape’. It doesn’t conceal anything: ‘It only sweetens the hues of nature – it gives a consequence to every common object, by giving it a more indistinct form – it corrects the glare of colours – it softens the harshness of lines; and above all, it throws over the face of landscape that harmonizing tint, which blends the whole into unity, and repose.’ The density of the English atmosphere became a connoisseurial cliché, and thereby a target for Jane Austen’s satire, as in Sense and Sensibility, much of which was drafted in the 1790s. In Chapter 18, Edward Ferrars gently mocks Marianne’s picturesque enthusiasms: ‘I shall call hills steep, which ought to be bold! surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregular and rugged; and distant objects out of sight, which ought only 41

a sweet view to be indistinct through the soft medium of a hazy atmosphere.’ Edward’s invisible scare quotes are like tongs, lifting up those hackneyed epithets ‘bold’, ‘irregular and rugged’, ‘indistinct’ and ‘hazy’ for mockery. The vocabulary of Gilpin’s appraisal – the tonal lowering, the line-softening, the harmonizing of heterogeneous motifs – promoted the English atmosphere’s special transformative appeal for the artist, particularly the watercolourist. His prescription: take the countryside’s intrinsically rich and stimulating natural contrasts and melt away any obstinately rectilinear property boundaries without effacing the scene’s essential variety.

Association and local attachment The patriotic enthusiasm fuelling the declarations of English independence from the oppressive authority of the old European landscape masters was boosted by popularized theories about the association of ideas and the psychological springs of the close emotional attachment we all have to certain places. This had very important consequences for promoting English country scenery, and deserves fuller attention now. Association theory derived from the physiology of visual perception, as understood in the eighteenth century, and from the belief that ideas are not innate but evolve from experience as it inscribes itself on the mind from birth onwards. Ideas evolve from raw sense-data received into the mind by sight, sound and other senses. There they are organized into associative clusters, and that condition influences thought and memory, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed: ‘Ideas by having been together acquire a power of recalling each other; or every partial representation awakes the total representation of which it had been a part.’ Since each individual grows up absorbing different sense-data from accumulated experiences, the processing of those experiences 42

The Picturesque and English Scenery

into our sensibility produces in each one of us a unique being; we and our individual tastes are the product of our associated experiences. The extent to which popularized associationism touched on the aesthetic evaluation of landscape and home scenery is suggested by one picturesque tourist’s passing remarks in his tour journal of 1803: every object to which we have been accustomed in the hours of infancy is associated with images of delight. The human mind, at its first entrance into this world, receives its ideas from the impressions which surrounding objects make upon the organ of sensation . . . Hence, every hill, and dale, and shrub, and plant, with which we have been familiar in our childhood, is connected in our association with an image of delight; and all the scenes which our infancy has witnessed, are endeared to the soul as long as the mind continues to combine and arrange its ideas, by those great moral laws with which the Almighty has seen fit to regulate the intellectual world. Association theory acquired a wide currency since it circulated to such people as this tourist in a number of very popular works of literature. One example was Samuel Rogers’s extraordinarily successful poem The Pleasures of Memory. This was published in 1792, and by 1816 it was in its nineteenth edition. A prefatory ‘Analysis’ by Rogers summarized his understanding of the association of ideas and how that leads to local attachment: When ideas have any relation whatever, they are attractive of each other in the mind; and the perception of any object naturally leads to the idea of another, which was connected with it either in time or place, or which can be compared or contrasted with it. Hence arises our attachment to inanimate 43

a sweet view objects; hence also, in some degree, the love of our country, and the emotions with which we contemplate the celebrated scenes of antiquity. The poem includes a short sequence of a boy’s bittersweet departure from his country home: [He] Turns on the neighbouring hill, once more to see The dear abode of peace and privacy; And as he turns, the thatch among the trees, The smoke’s blue wreaths ascending with the breeze, The village-common spotted white with sheep, The churchyard yews round which his fathers sleep; All rouse Reflection’s sadly-pleasing train, And oft he looks and weeps, and looks again.

An edition of the poem from 1855 illustrated the boy’s sweet view in a mode that epitomized the mid-Victorian English rural idyll (illus. 15). Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste promoted associationist ideas in relation to natural scenery and the concept of beauty. Published in 1790, it was in its fifth edition by 1817, and its ideas had been further propagated in an extended notice in the Edinburgh Review in May 1811. Constable knew it well. By the time of the Regency it had become the fashion ‘to pretend to refer everything to association of ideas’, according to William Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Taste’ in 1819. This new understanding of the processes of perception and evaluation is very significant. In the realm of aesthetics, the association of ideas proved a powerful force in undermining the sense that there was an absolute standard of beauty (related to the ideal ‘central form’, stripped of accidental deformities, as promoted by the Royal Academy), or that certain objects were intrinsically 44

The Picturesque and English Scenery 15 William Stephen Coleman, ‘The smoke’s blue wreaths ascending with the breeze’, illustration to Samuel Rogers, The Pleasures of Memory (1855).

beautiful because of their proportion, or colour mix, or whatever. ‘A thousand different sentiments, excited by the same object, are all right,’ argued David Hume in 1757: ‘Because no sentiment represents what is really in the object . . . Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.’ Associationism vindicated the relativist, subjective position in aesthetics. In effect it helped to democratize taste and validate the literary forms of intense introspection so often encountered in Romanticism. The shifting aesthetic stimulated by associationism has been linked by Kay Dian Kriz to that ‘turn from a universalist aesthetic in history 45

a sweet view and landscape painting . . . to inflect the customary and the local rather than the ideal and the transnational’. The ordinary person becomes culturally empowered; their individual sense of what is beautiful is validated, whether or not that beauty conforms to academic aesthetics – in other words, there is no need for subservience to the aesthetic principles of a cultural elite, as for instance in the conventional elevation of Italian scenic beauty above the claims of English scenery. In this more openly hospitable and inclusive climate, formerly insignificant things assumed emotion-laden significance through their local attachment – so much so that, for some, nothing attracted the attention so much as neglect. John Clare wrote a poetic ‘Address to an Insignificant Flower, Obscurely Blooming in a Lonely Wild’ (insignificant, obscure, lonely – predicaments with which he explicitly identified himself). The argument for associationist subjectivity was clearly formulated in a poem of 1796 by Richard Polwhele: No country, then, is fair to all alike; No landscape with inherent beauty glows; But different objects different creatures strike . . . The mind alone, from habitude bestows On each material form its shadowy grace: And thus a never-ceasing pleasure flows Or to the human, or the bestial race From those ideal charms we all attach to place.

These lines come from Polwhele’s long poem The Influence of Local Attachment with Respect to Home, to which he appended a five-page ‘Analysis’ of his poem, discussing the connections between association theory and local attachment (he also had to defend himself from plagiarizing Rogers’s Pleasures of Memory). The encouragement of aesthetic subjectivity fostered the importance of local 46

The Picturesque and English Scenery

attachment in playing a major part in the evaluation of landscape scenery, and this in turn encouraged an extension of the range of landscape types and motifs that could be given value. Some nineteenth-century medical writings even reinforced local attachment on pathological grounds, by arguing that exposure to tropical climates bred disease and bodily decay. Dispatching English consumptives to Italy or Madeira for cure by change of climate could, therefore, be a mistake. Thomas Burgess’s book Climate of Italy in Relation to Pulmonary Consumption (1852) argued for ‘the natural and rational conclusion [that] Nature adapted the constitution of man to his hereditary climate’. The ‘sweet view’ could thus be sweetened still further by local attachment; its ultimate distillation was the ideal of ‘Home’, so venerated by Victorian sentiment – ‘a decent home’, as William Morris described his England. Local attachment as opposed to cosmopolitanism had become a cultural topic of some significance in eighteenth-century England. Many years ago Alan McKillop traced the rise of this debate from the late seventeenth century, and explored the extent to which it drew in related aspects of homesickness and nostalgia, patriotism, environmental determinism and association theory. However, his exploration was conducted principally through literary texts; it took little or no account of contemporary political pressure in nuancing such debates. But this intensifying focus on local attachment in England in the last decade or two of the eighteenth century was surely related to the tension with France, the outbreak of war in 1793, and subsequent fear of invasion. The years of war with France and effective closing off of the European continent enforced a national introspection, an intensified attachment and a heightened sense of protectiveness for the country: to quote Samuel Rogers again – ‘Hence arises our attachment to inanimate objects; hence also, in some degree, the love of our country.’ Love of one’s country fosters love of one’s countryside as the visible countenance of 47

a sweet view the loved one, giving yet another reason to celebrate the native landscape in painting and poetry. Country scenery acquired heightened emotional value by virtue of its patriotic and domestic associations, and that translated into a sense of its beauty. John Clare’s poem ‘The Flitting’, evoking rural scenes that had meant so much to him, featured ‘green lanes that shut out burning skies’, ‘old crooked stiles to rest upon’, hawthorns ‘hung with may’. He called them ‘home bred pictures’, like Constable’s term for his range of portraits of Suffolk landscapes – ‘home scenery’. Constable declared in 1832 that the material for his art was ‘to be found under every hedge, and in every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth picking up’. But such neglected material had been picked up, and with great relish, during the 1790s, when the picturesque began a new phase of theorizing. The first phase of the picturesque may be represented by the succession of Gilpin’s Observations tour books in the 1780s, with their connoisseurial discussions of British scenery and recommendations for the ‘correct’ composing of views in the Lakes and Highlands and along the River Wye. In the course of this newly focused attention, the particular characteristics of English scenery began to be identified and foregrounded. The next phase, in the 1790s, seized on neglected rural motifs – neglected by the improvers, neglected by the Academy canon. The more neglected they were, the better they suited the picturesque aesthetic in their roughened and weathered appearance, and the more they appealed as representing a homely native scenery charged with sentimental associations. The one great beneficiary of the cultural rehabilitation of such scenery was the promotion of the neglected vernacular landscape of England as a whole.

48

two

Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s ‘Genuine English Scenery’ A more delightful specimen of genuine English scenery and English atmosphere we never beheld. Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review (1826)

T

his accolade to Englishness in country scenery came from a reviewer of John Constable’s The Cornfield when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in the spring of 1826. What made this scene and its ‘atmosphere’ so genuinely English? The painting’s popular appeal has increased steadily over the two centuries since its creation. Having grown to be part of the mental furniture for so many English people, it has been reproduced in domestic furniture and accessories: wallpaper, wall tiles, coasters, trays, cushions, biscuit tins, crockery decoration, fridge magnets, clock faces . . . That Suffolk lane scene has grown into people’s homes. The Cornfield is a central image in any search for what constitutes Englishness in rural scenery. In its chosen motifs and in its painterly handling it looked back to the late eighteenth-century picturesque, and it helped to shape a countryside idyll for the later Victorians. This chapter explores some of the stages leading to The Cornfield’s status as a showpiece of ‘genuine English scenery’. We start with the 1790s and a growing perplexity over what exactly the ‘picturesque’ meant in designating certain kinds of rural scenery. 49

a sweet view

Rough nature in retreat William Gilpin’s main purpose in his Observations books had been to guide the tourist-artist in the ‘correct’ arrangement of their landscape compositions and to edit British scenery in order to achieve that correctness. He stipulated early on that landscape representation needed a roughness and irregularity in the contours and textures of the objects to be organized within the frame – broken lines, bold contrasts and diversity of colouring. These conditions were what, for him, distinguished picturesque beauty from beauty tout court: roughness . . . forms an essential difference between the beau­ tiful, and the picturesque . . . the picturesque eye abhors art; and delights solely in nature . . . art abounds with regularity, which is only another name for smoothness; and the images of nature with irregularity, which is only another name for roughness. By insisting on roughness, Gilpin does not mean to invoke the full sublime. He is not reaching for the terror of mighty precipices, raging cataracts and thundering avalanches. His ideal is a

50

16 William Gilpin, ‘View of Goodrich Castle from the River Wye’, illustration from Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales (1782): ‘This view, which is one of the grandest on the river, I should not scruple to call correctly picturesque; which is seldom the character of a purely natural scene’ (p. 18).

Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s Englishness

17 Francis Bedford, ‘Goodrich Castle’, albumen silver print published in William and Mary Howitt, Ruined Abbeys and Castles of Great Britain (1862).

moderated roughness, of the kind that uncultivated, un-‘improved’ English country scenery could plentifully furnish the artist with. He is adamant about that: ‘the picturesque eye abhors art’ (‘art’ meaning anything artificial). Gilpin’s view of Goodrich Castle on the River Wye features the broken lines of the old castle viewed between the steep riverbanks roughened with loosely scribbled shrubs. That is the kind and degree of roughness he wanted. The Civil War, time and nature have combined to ruin the ‘art’ of Goodrich Castle, irregularize it and return it to a state of nature (illus. 16, 17). In emphasizing these qualities as essential distinctions of the picturesque, and in suggesting a radical alienation between ‘nature’ and ‘art’, Gilpin undoubtedly caught some of the currents of the period in terms of changing taste. But as time went on, a compromise between these opposites became imperative as a foundation for forming an English rural idyll. There had already been a 51

a sweet view tradition of such compromises variously invoked to represent an ideal of rural or horticultural beauty. Sir Henry Wotton’s The Elements of Architecture (1624) had recommended a ‘wilde Regularitie’ as the ideal design agenda for gardens. Alexander Pope in the Epistle to Burlington (1731) called for an ‘artful wildness’ to ‘perplex’ the landscaped garden scene. Humphry Repton defined English gardening as ‘a happy medium’ between the cultivated and the wild, between rigid despotism and liberty. It was over the nineteenth century that this oxymoronic concept became a key criterion not just for gardening but for the ideal of the English countryside as a whole – the countryside that presented its utterly distinctive ‘ordered confusion’ to H. G. Wells’s Mr Polly. Gilpin decided to explore the implications of the ideas and practices he had initiated in his tour books by writing some essays in the early 1790s. He hit a problem in the very first of these essays, ‘On Picturesque Beauty’. Within the formalist terms of his discussions of the picturesque, he found himself unable to explain quite why roughness, despite its attractions, was so essential. Among the ideas he played with, Gilpin suggested a purely technical reason: rough objects encourage the artist to exercise ‘a free, bold touch’ that allowed the painter to bestow ‘the graces of his art’ upon his motif. ‘In landscape universally the rougher objects are admired,’ he wrote, because these ‘give the freest scope to execution. If the pencil be timid, or hesitating, little beauty results.’ Rough objects were easier for the amateur artist to represent; that consideration may have been in Gilpin’s mind, since his works were addressed to the touring non-professional artists. In 1814 the Norwich writer William Taylor made a similar correlation between draughtsmanship and the kind of scenery now coming into focus as prime material for the amateur sketcher: ‘The ignoble is of easier attainment than the beautiful . . . A degraded nature is imitated with less trouble than the entire – if a cottage is drawn out of perspective, the jagged thatch hides 52

Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s Englishness

the undue convergence of the lines . . . pollard trees conceal imprecision of the outline.’ Gilpin’s recommendation of roughened landscape motifs for encouraging ‘a free, bold touch’ perhaps also reflects the conventional account of the origins of the word ‘picturesque’ in the Italian pittoresco. This term (or derivatives thereof) was used by earlier art historians to designate a bravura painting style that called attention to the idiosyncratic, bold painterliness of the work. William Aglionby, in a book of 1685 entitled Painting Illustrated in Three Diallogues [sic], had one of his speakers contend that ‘over Diligence’ in painting could lead to a loss of ‘the freedom of Nature’, and that a less finished manner could ‘preserve the Natural’: ‘This the Italians call, Working A la pittor­ esk, that is Boldly.’ Gilpin claims that only rough objects give the artist that encouragement to take expressive freedom. Gilpin’s encouragement of a ‘free, bold touch’ also corresponds to the late eighteenth-century interest in suggestive sketchiness in landscape painting and drawing. The unfinished picture stimulated active imagining in the viewer, in order to complete or elaborate the fragmentary scene or object portrayed. Edmund Burke’s Enquiry had noted the attraction of the sketch: ‘the imagination is entertained with the promise of something more, and does not acquiesce in the present object of the sense’, and that pleased Burke ‘beyond the best finishing’. This was an additional part of the appeal of ruins; they offered romantically suggestive non finito motifs. Gilpin decided to test out his ideas on the great arbiter in matters of artistic taste, Sir Joshua Reynolds. In 1791 he sent the aged Reynolds the first of his Three Essays, hoping to receive the great man’s imprimatur. The response was what he might have expected from the former president of the Royal Academy. Reynolds made it clear, with great politeness, that in his view the picturesque applied only ‘to excellences of an inferior order . . . incompatible with the grand stile’. He agreed with Gilpin that ‘variety of tints and forms’ characterized the picturesque, but pointed out that it 53

a sweet view was the antithesis of the grand style, which insists on ‘uniformity of colour, and a long continuation of lines’. This uniformity and unbrokenness of line were, as Reynolds recognized, profoundly threatened by the growing popularity of the picturesque, which helped to loosen the formal hold of the grand style just as it widened the repertoire of vernacular subjects for the landscape artist. This debate between Gilpin and Reynolds and other writers on art and gardening in the 1790s was not just a recondite subject for professionals. There were reasons for this hunger for roughness and irregularity that were evident outside the art establishment. To begin with, we might consider the aesthetics of roughness and smoothness, irregularity and ‘long continuation of lines’ in the contemporary domestic setting. Georgian ‘Conversation Pieces’ are useful witnesses to the taste that the gentry and professional classes wished to project. Arthur Devis’s The Duet (1749; illus. 18) complements the human duet beside the harpsichord with a complex background ‘duet’ between real and artificial landscapes. The tall windows give on to groomed parkland and distant hills under a benignly warm sky. The view is mediated by the windowpane grid, looking somewhat like an artist’s mark-up of a sketch in preparation for the scaled-up gridding of the canvas. The adjacent paintings of rural views vary the ‘smiling’ landscape mood by introducing the brooding sublime of foreign scenes. The interplay between real (though framed) and artificial (though wild) landscapes teases in this Georgian domestic background. Devis’s portrait of The Reverend Thomas D’Oyly with His Wife, Henrietta Maria (illus. 19) plays another variation on this jostling of contrasts. The neat geometry of the D’Oylys’ room and its smooth surfaces are counterpointed by the prominent landscape painting above the mantelpiece. It seems to bring light into the room as well as offer a window on to a world where roughness and irregularity reign, albeit boxed within a frame. 54

Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s Englishness

The romantic landscape hangs parallel to the caged bird. Both wild creations are ‘captured’ nature, as it were, and converted to domestic ornaments. The appeal of wild landscapes as a counterpoint to the demure domestic world fashioned for the middle classes was summarized by the agricultural writer William Marshall, in his review of Richard Payne Knight’s The Landscape in 1795: the draughtsman was driven into the recesses of the mountains, for the subject of his pencil. From thence he brought home scenes, . . . such as were acceptable to his customers; as forming an agreeable contrast with the ordinary scenery in the environs of cities . . . Indeed, at all times, and every where, one great end of Landscape painting is to bring distant scenery, – and such more particularly as is wild and not easily accessible, – under the eye, in a cultivated, and an embellished site: and not to expose itself, by a faint imitation of the views which are seen from the windows of the room, for which the repre­sentations are intended as furniture. Landscape art flourished as the means for bringing wild scenery back into a domesticated world that felt it was insulating itself from nature; its rough and irregular imagery acted as a stimulating visual relief from the smooth rectilinearity of their familiar environment. The groomed, efficient geometry of middle-class Georgian domestic interiors was being replicated and extended in the world outside by that great agent of landscape transformation in this period, the parliamentary enclosures undertaken for the sake of agricultural improvement. The Enclosure Act Commissioners from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth replaced about a quarter of England’s existing common land and wastes with grids of predominantly straight-edged fields; about 322,000 kilometres (200,000 mi.) of hedges were planted, most of them 55

a sweet view running in straight lines. Accordingly, the landscapes particularly favoured for their high picturesque value were precisely those marginalized by such enclosure programmes – stretches of neglected common land, deeply rutted, with scatterings of gnarled and broken-limbed trees, gorse bushes and grazing donkeys, and with gypsy camps and decaying cottages. This was the kind of derelict land that drew the condemnation of the official reporters to the Board of Agriculture: it was waste land, in their view unfit for proper pasture and overstocked with grazing animals, swampy and impassable for vehicles, a hideaway for unsavoury people, and littered with foul makeshift hovels – the so-called Mushroom halls erected by squatters. The growth of the population in the late eighteenth century together with the economic and social impact

18 Arthur Devis, The Duet, 1749, oil on canvas.

56

Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s Englishness

19 Arthur Devis, The Reverend Thomas D’Oyly with His Wife, Henrietta Maria, 1740s, oil on canvas.

of enclosures and the agricultural revolution forced a dislocated rural proletariat on to the commons to attempt small-scale subsistence farming. Thomas Batchelor’s poem ‘Progress of Agriculture’ acclaimed the ‘Open fields inclosed’: But, Industry, thy unremitting hand Has chang’d the formless aspect of the land . . . And hawthorn fences, stretch’d from side to side, Contiguous pastures, meadows, fields divide . . . In those dull scenes, unheeded, and unknown: But now, see! Stables, granaries, barns extend, White fences shine, and household smoke ascend. 57

a sweet view The use of that word ‘formless’ is significant in the context of that tension between ‘art’ and nature. Batchelor is describing almost the reverse of the processes that turned the ‘art’ of Goodrich Castle into a ‘formless’ picturesque ruin. ‘Industry’ now transforms the ‘formless’, ‘dull scenes’ of the older English landscape and imposes a grid of new hawthorn hedging and shiny white fences across the landscape. The enclosure programme and its relationship with contemporary landscape aesthetics have been much debated over the last half century. Batchelor’s lines were quoted in John Barrell’s study of the tension between ideas of beauty, utility, improvement and the picturesque, in his book on John Clare, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840 (1972). Barrell’s study is still one of the most illuminating and well-documented discussions of this tangled topic, drawing heavily on the contemporary reports to the Board of Agriculture. One such reporter was Joseph Plymley, who submitted his report for Shropshire at the start of the nineteenth century. He supported the programme of planned enclosures but also acknowl­­ edged the damage that could be inflicted on the look of the English landscape: ‘It must be owned, a great deal of beauty is often spoiled by enclosures; and it seems a pity to lose scenes of pure Nature, in a country so artificial as that of South Britain.’ Ian Waites, who discusses Plymley’s report, surmises that ‘artificial’ means ‘enclosed’, but presumably Plymley would also include towns, villages and great estates, as well as all land given over to agriculture. What is lost to English landscape, according to Plymley, would be ‘every variation of swelling banks and retired dingles’. This is exactly the kind of disappearing scenery that Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown was blamed for destroying in his landscape gardening programme of ‘smoothing and levelling the ground’. Brown was not parcelling up the estates of the great landowners, as enclos­ures were doing to the wider countryside (in fact he was erasing the older compartmentalizing of gardens), but in remodelling the estates on a grand scale he 58

Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s Englishness

was introducing a formulaic new look that was relentlessly attacked by proponents of the picturesque in the 1790s. Brown’s most vigorous opponent was the Herefordshire landowner Uvedale Price. Price’s Essay on the Picturesque (1796) was concerned with (as the subtitle put it) The Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape, and he put his principles into practice at his own estate, Foxley. Here is an example of Price’s attacks on Brown’s ‘smoothing and levelling’: the moment this mechanical common-place operation (by which Mr Brown and his followers have gained so much credit) is begun, adieu to all that the painter admires – to all intricacies – to all the beautiful varieties of form, tint, and light and shade; every deep recess – every bold projection – the fantastic roots of trees – the winding paths of sheep – all must go; in a few hours, the rash hand of false taste completely demolishes what time only, and a thousand lucky accidents, can mature, so as to make it become the admiration and study of a Ruysdal or a Gainsborough, and reduces it to such a thing as an Oilman in Thames-street may at any time contract for by the yard at Islington or Mile-End. Plymley’s charming ‘variation’, like Price’s ‘beautiful varieties of form’ (and like Reynolds’s definition of the picturesque as ‘variety of tints and forms’), is presumably what Batchelor negatively designated ‘the formless aspect of the land’ (my italics), before it was remodelled by enclosure. Plymley’s ‘pure Nature’ is thus driven into retreat, into the depths of forests, forgotten country villages and desolate common land. From there it is retrieved by ‘a Gainsborough’, whose precious records of endangered nature and Old England become treasured commodities. Gainsborough’s elegiac late ‘cottage door’ pictures with their roughened textures, broken lines and strong, abrupt lighting contrasts capture this sense 59

a sweet view 20 Thomas Gainsborough, The Cottage Door, 1780s, oil on canvas.

of ancient forest retreats with huddled communities of refugees (both human and arboreal) from ‘improving’ modern England (illus. 20). Gainsborough is perfectly attuned to the English mindset that has begun to feel these changes acutely. We can sense this in his famous remark: ‘I’m sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol da Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village, where I can paint Landskips and enjoy the fag End of life in quietness and ease.’ His wished-for retreat from ‘Portraits’ in order to recover landscapes of Old England is like a rehearsal for Plymley’s opposition of the ‘artificial’ (or ‘art’ in Gilpin’s sense) 60

Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s Englishness

to the shrinking idyll of ‘scenes of pure Nature’. Price was a friend of Gainsborough, and fondly recalled their companionship on rides into this remote countryside: I made frequent excursions with him into the country; he was a man of an eager irritable mind, though warmly attached to those he loved; of a lively and playful imagination, yet at times severe and sarcastic: but when we came to cottage or village scenes, to groups of children, or to any objects of that kind which struck his fancy, I have often remarked in his countenance an expression of particular gentleness and complacency. It is an engaging thumbnail sketch of an evidently complex man. Gainsborough’s sentimental attachment to a peopled country scene – cottage or village scenery, with children (illus. 21) – is striking, and these are of course his principal motifs in the landscape paintings. They also constitute the parent iconography for

21 Thomas Gainsborough, Landscape with Cottage and Church, 1771–2, oil on canvas.

61

a sweet view what became the cardinal image of English country scenery for the Victorians: the ‘sweet view’ that had escaped industrial and urban modernization. That term ‘sweet’ was actually applied by Gainsborough to this very motif – ‘some sweet Village’. Price’s reminiscences about how scenes of cottage and village life brought out Gainsborough’s gentle humanity prompted him into more general remarks on the relation between landscape gardening and landscape painting: There is, indeed, something despotic in the general system of improvement; all must be laid open; all that obstructs, levelled to the ground; houses, orchards, gardens, all swept away. Painting, on the contrary, tends to humanize the mind: where a despot thinks every person an intruder who enters his do­­ main, and wishes to destroy cottages and pathways, and to reign alone, the lover of painting considers the dwellings, the inhabitants, and the marks of their intercourse, as ornaments to the landscape. Many thematic threads are interwoven tightly here. Landscape painting for Price (and he is surely thinking of Gainsborough’s pictures) is sui generis a retreat from the real contemporary world of rural change, such as the plutocratic engrossment of land and large-scale ‘improvements’ to create private and exclusive landscapes. Against that is the artist’s devotion to cherishing and preserving that age-old communitarian world of cottages, villages and byways. Here we see the early phase of that construction of an English rural idyll that was to provide a model retreat for later generations, for the Victorians. For them, however, it was no longer just the despotic local landlord who was desecrating the environment, as in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770). The engines of change were England’s rapidly expanding towns and cities, her industrial developments and her railways. The landscape 62

Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s Englishness

artist figured by William Marshall was a kind of big-game hunter (the ‘game’ to be captured was wild scenery); but that role of the landscape artist then modulates into that of the sentimental conservationist. The picturesque gradually softens and sweetens its more abrasive Pricean repertoire into the ‘English comfort’ fondly invoked by Emma’s heroine. Those ‘retired dingles’ that Plymley saw being destroyed by enclosures will become the precious mystical nooks and dells dreamed of by Samuel Palmer in his English pastoral fantasies; the ‘swelling banks’ will soften into the cushiony, wild-flower slopes beside the prettified cottages of Myles Birket Foster and Helen Allingham. The sweetening embryonic Victorian rural idyll is already in sight.

Irritation, beauty and utility ‘Il riposo di Claudio’: this was the phrase adopted by Uvedale Price in characterizing the classic serenity of Claude’s landscapes. View­ing those images, he wrote, we feel ‘that mild and equal sunshine of the soul which warms and cheers, but neither inflames nor irritates . . . A mind in such a state may be compared to the surface of a pure and tranquil lake.’ However, the mind – and eye – of the aficionado of Price’s picturesque wanted to be irritated. What the sedative Claude and the ‘smoothing and levelling’ Brown failed to provide in landscape terms was the abrasive visual stimulus of the northern European artists, such as Rubens and Rembrandt. Rubens’s landscapes, Price continues, ‘are full of the peculiarities, and picturesque accidents in nature – of striking contrasts in form and colour, and light and shadow: sunbeams bursting through a small opening in a dark wood’. There is a new appeal to sensory pleasures here. Price seems to be suggesting that visual pleasure of the more dynamic kind is enhanced by developing a synaesthetic property. For example, broken surfaces under strong light ‘have also by sympathy somewhat of the same effect on the sight, 63

a sweet view as on the touch . . . Indeed, as it is generally admitted, that the sense of seeing acquires all its perceptions of hard, soft, rough, smooth, &c. from that of feeling, such a sympathy seems almost inavoidable.’ Sight becomes a kind of virtual touching. This idea of ‘haptic visuality’ has been explored by the film critic Laura Marks and related to movements in the broader history of Western art. The idea seems to me to have some bearing also on the picturesque in this period. In her book The Skin of the Film (2000) Marks cites Bernard Berenson’s argument that the quality most essential to painting was ‘The power to stimulate the tactile consciousness’, and she writes of ‘the gradual demise of a physical tactility in art and the rise of figurative space’: Haptic representation has continued to be a viable strategy in Western art, though until recently it has been relegated to minor traditions [which] involve intimate, detailed images that invite a small, caressing gaze. Usually art history has deemed them secondary to grand compositions, important subjects, and an exalted position of the viewer. This kind of haptic visuality seems precisely what Price is interested in encouraging in garden design, as in landscape painting, particularly in those almost abrasively stimulating passages for the restless eye to explore, with a ‘caressing gaze’, in the foregrounds of his forest and lakeside views at Foxley. It is tempting to see the English picturesque in this later phase as part of a turning point in Western landscape art, as it struggles to find the vocabulary to express this assertion of the attractions of a rugged, sensuous vernacular. Bored by riposo, by Reynolds’s ‘uniformity of colour, and a long continuation of lines’, and by exalted prospect views, this picturesque delights in stimulating variety in its pictorial or horticultural art. It hungers for a rough and quasiphysical tactility, and adopts a lowered viewpoint where foreground 64

Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s Englishness

detail can press these delights on the eye more urgently. Indeed the picturesque stretches along a very extensive gamut in English culture. It began as an Enlightenment project deploying its neoclassical aesthetics and rules of composition. It then modulated into Romantic sensationism, delighting in roughness, ruins and gypsydom; and from there into sentimental conservationism and an awakening environmental anxiety. With the increasing domination of the ‘artificial’ in England, ‘pure Nature’ now becomes iconized in particular rural features; these are then assembled within the painter’s frame or imported into the picturesque garden. Designing the latter, in Price’s gardening plans, entailed some strenuous enterprises. He describes blowing up with gunpowder a mass of limestone, then selecting from the debris ‘all that was mossy and incrusted’ and adding this to the ‘amazingly picturesque stubs of oak, ash[,] witch elm’ and so on, to form some captivating foregrounds for his estate. He counselled Sir George and Lady Beaumont, in their garden at Coleorton, Leicestershire, to break open the surface of a quarry on their estate, and reserve ‘any old mossy stones, or that have a good patina upon them . . . for future foregrounds’. ‘Future foregrounds’ – the phrase is almost prophetic of the Victorian taste for this kind of motif. One thinks of some of those PreRaphaelite landscape foregrounds bejewelled with flowers and mossy stumps. Price’s gardening programme of managed accident – in effect a kind of ‘negative gardening’ – appalled many other practitioners, Humphry Repton among them. William Mason, the poet of The English Garden, put his reactions into verse. Admiring his own neat garden, he turns with horror to consider the roughness of the fashionably ‘Picturesque’ alternatives: Yet sun and shade, and hills and dale are thine, And use with beauty here more surely found, 65

a sweet view Than where, to spread the Picturesque around, Cart ruts and quarry holes their charms combine!

Mason stresses the need to unite beauty and utility, which the picturesque was straining to separate. It was the roughness of a neglected, obsolescent rural world that now appealed to the picturesque aficionado, not the scenery of modernizing England. Gilpin had set out some crucial distinctions between picturesque beauty and utility, associating the non-picturesque (but morally gratifying) with trim hedges, bountiful cornfields and labourers busy at work: Moral, and picturesque ideas do not always coincide. In a moral light, cultivation, in all its parts, is pleasing; the hedge, and the furrow; the waving corn field, and the ripened sheaf. But all these, the picturesque eye, in quest of scenes of grandeur, and beauty, looks at with disgust. It ranges after nature, untamed by art, and bursting wildly into all its irregular forms . . . It is thus also in the introduction of figures. In a moral view, the industrious mechanic is a more pleasing object, than the loitering peasant. But in a picturesque light, it is otherwise. The arts of industry are rejected; and even idleness, if I may so speak, adds dignity to a character. Thus the lazy cowherd resting on his pole; or the peasant lolling on a rock, may be allowed in the grandest scenes; while the laborious mechanic, with his impliments of labour, would be repulsed. In an age when ‘the deserving poor’ (the social counterpart of ‘improvement’) were being promoted as the only proper object of charitable support, this association of idleness with dignity was a striking moral challenge. Urban change was also favouring a new geometry. The late Georg­­ian patterning of town streets, terraces, squares and 66

Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s Englishness 22 Nathaniel Rogers Hewitt, after James Wyld, Plan of the United Parishes of St Giles in the Fields and St George, Bloomsbury, 1824, engraving.

crescents, and the elegant Neoclassical design of the houses of the wealthy (as in the Devis ‘Conversation Pieces’) were sharpen­ ing this taste for contrasting aesthetic experiences, for spontaneously irregular forms. This reaction against the ‘long continuation of lines’ continued into the Victorian period. John Ruskin had a passionate loathing for London’s Gower Street, with its lines of unbroken late Georgian terraces. It is one of the long north–south streets in the Bedford estate whose grid-like design was such a 67

a sweet view contrast to the older haphazard and mazy congestion of courts, alleys and twisting thoroughfares in St Giles below (illus. 22). The picturesque appeal of Gower Street’s utter antithesis, as for example in J. T. Smith’s ‘Lady Plomer’s Palace’, is easy to sense (illus. 23). Gower Street was for Ruskin ‘the ne plus ultra of ugliness in British architecture’. In Volume iii of Modern Painters (1856) he tried to account for the same changing taste as I have been exploring, the appetite for the wild and the rough. That appetite was a modern phenomenon, he argued. The roots of this new delight in wild scenery could be found in the reactions to what was happening to the contemporary environment. Gower Street epitomized this for him: though still forced, by rule and fashion, to the producing . . . all that is ugly, men steal out, half-ashamed of themselves for doing so, to the fields and mountains; and, finding among these the colour, and liberty, and variety, and power, which are

23 J. T. Smith, ‘Lady Plomer’s Palace, on the Summit of Hawke’s Bill Wood, Epping Forest’, engraving from Remarks on Rural Scenery (1797).

68

Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s Englishness

forever grateful to them . . . rejoice in all the wildest shattering of the mountain side, as an opposition to Gower Street. This compensatory roughness and variety edges towards the sublime, as Ruskin reacts violently to the suffocating uniformity of the built environment. It was out of this tension caused by a changing national landscape, changing in its domestic, urban and agricultural areas, that roughness and irregularity came to be cherished by proponents of the picturesque for a whole range of reasons beyond the purely aesthetic and formalist, such as hunger for the diminishing natural scene and nostalgia for some pre-industrial Old England. The rough charms of the newly constituted picturesque are invoked as relief from the modernizing environment. Writing in 1816, the architect Richard Elsam acknowledged that ‘Such is the prevailing taste for irregularity in modern improvements, that it is almost dangerous to propound any thing new in architecture which does not relate to irregular structures or to the picturesque in building.’ It is a foretaste of the reactive aesthetic that formed the basis for the Victorian rural idyll. One of the makers of that idyll, Samuel Palmer, suggested in the 1870s (and his italics in this quotation seem to invoke haptic visuality) that over time the English spectator had tired of urban design, both its buildings and its street layout: ‘In Italian cities I think the English eye enjoys physically a rest from right angles and perfectly straight lines which harass it in every square rood of London buildings . . . I do not mean to assert that irregularity is beauty, but merely that emancipation from rule and compass lines is a visual comfort.’ Irregularity was becoming the new ‘beauty’, or at least the new picturesque, during the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth. The wild and the domesticated, roughness and riposo smoothness, negative gardening and improvement, nature and art: the 69

a sweet view 24, 25 Humphry Repton, ‘Improvements’, illustrations from Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1816).

contending antitheses were shaping the debates about the nature and function of the picturesque and the refocusing of ideas of English scenery. Symptomatically, the picturesque writers used illustrated before-and-after contrasts to demonstrate their picturesque ideals, in both landscape and horticultural terms. Humphry Repton’s Red Books, with their before-and-after overlays, used the same device. In his Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1816), written near the end of his life, 70

Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s Englishness

Repton juxtaposed two pictures showing the consequences of ‘Improvements’ over a decade to a spot where parkland bordered a public highway (illus. 24, 25). The lower view is of the scene when he first knew it. A benign landowner and his patriarchal beeches or oaks are content to share their ancient natural amenities with wayfarers (the ladder-stile and careless dilapidation of the fence all betoken a welcome). The social benevolence is accompanied by delicious scenic effects for the picturesque eye: the dappled light and shade, the rough texturing in hedges, fencing and rutted road, the rich swags of foliage, the gentle curves throughout the scene. After the ‘Improvements’ by a new landowner, everything has stiffened into a more efficient geometry: the fir trees are like brush bristles, affording no shade or comfort; a harsh glare has replaced the gentle dappling; and the old, hospitable ladder-stile has been replaced by a notice threatening mantraps to any trespassers. The frequent adoption of juxtaposed illustrations by the landscape writers suggests the acceleration of radical changes happening to the English landscape, whether engineered or accidental – the bifurcation (under pressure) of options for imaging an ideal England. The before-and-after technique may well represent contemporary mindsets, where two very different Englands are constantly present and in tension. Whether in literary or pictorial form, this binary illustrative system continued to be used in the nineteenth century, and we shall see further instances in the next chapter. It was adopted for propagandist practices by culturally influential Victorians to articulate their Conditionof-England critiques. Examples are A.W.N. Pugin’s Contrasts (particularly the enlarged edition of 1841) and Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843).

71

a sweet view

The ‘national look’ and ‘genuine English scenery’: Gainsborough and Constable Let us look at specific instances of the ways in which landscape artists articulated this transitional tension in the scenery of English countryside. We return to Gainsborough first. In the 1780s an article appeared in the Morning Post, ‘Hints to Professors of Landscape Painting’. With high irony the author warned anyone who might be tempted to diverge from the ‘Old School’ manner (‘Athenian Temples and Roman Ruins in English Landscape’) to leave simple and elegant ‘picturesque ideas of nature’ to ‘the man in Pall Mall’. The Pall Mall man was Thomas Gainsborough, then living at 80 Pall Mall. This is the painter (continues the Post, with even shriller mock-disgust) who notoriously filled ‘his canvas with unthatched cottages and their bare-legged inhabitants. This is vulgar nature – pray avoid it.’Gainsborough’s death in 1788 was marked with some significant tributes, including one by Reynolds in his fourteenth annual Discourse at the Royal Academy. One obituarist credited him with discovering a ‘preferable school in sequestered nooks, woody uplands, retired cottages, the avenues of forest sheep, cattle, villagers and woodmen’. With this list of motifs Gainsborough was acclaimed as the one who initiated the specific portraiture of English rural scenery that would eventually shape the Victorian rural idyll. In 1813 The Repository of Arts declared that Gainsborough’s ‘sketches had improved the general taste for English landscape composition’, and went on to confirm Gainsborough as both the originator of specifically English picturesque scenery, and the spur for artists to follow his example: From his designs a love for the picturesque was created, and those who, before the appearance of his rude oaks and deeprutted lanes, his rustic figures and moss-grown cottages and barns, with the truth of colouring which he introduced from 72

Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s Englishness

his attentive observation of nature, were content to amuse themselves by making landscape compositions from the Italian, Dutch, and Flemish prints, now left their painting-rooms to explore the scenery of their own country. Recognition of Gainsborough’s celebration of the English vernacular continued in the early decades of the nineteenth century. ‘No academy schooled down into uniformity and imitation the truly English and intrepid spirit of Gainsborough,’ declared Allan Cunningham in his Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1829); ‘He has not steeped his landscapes in the atmosphere of Italy, like [Richard] Wilson.’ He portrayed wild woodland ‘nooks’, glades and valleys, and all his works ‘are stamped with the image of old England’; his paintings ‘have a national look’. This concept of Old England is one that I will be invoking quite often. The cachet – ‘stamped with the image of old England’ – rather simplifies the identity of Gainsborough’s landscape art, which has been a focus of debate in recent decades over its aesthetic, moral and political meanings. The scenery of Old England is certainly there in his paintings, but so is another England, and the two coexist in sometimes puzzling relationship. Two examples of such complexity are Gainsborough’s painting Landscape with a Woodcutter Courting a Milkmaid (1755; illus. 26) and his Peasant Ploughing with Two Horses (1750–53; illus. 27). The Woodcutter landscape concentrates several separate rustic scenes into one view. The scenes in the first two distances are particularly striking in their relationship to each other. On the left, and slightly recessed, is a ploughing scene overlooked by graceful sinuous trees and with a glimpse of a town in the background. On the right, on our side of the old fence and in a warmly tinted glow, the woodcutter courts the milkmaid as she sits on a crumbling bank, in the hollow of an ancient pollarded oak. The close juxtaposition of the 73

a sweet view 26 Thomas Gainsborough, Landscape with a Woodcutter Courting a Milkmaid, 1755, oil on canvas.

two contrasted activities and landscape types, of smoothness versus roughness, gives the picture an emblematic feel, as several commentators have observed. Industry and idleness? Georgic and pastoral? Modern and ancient worlds? Enclosure and the commons? Just what is it saying in its pairing of the two scenes? The second painting presents the same striking juxtaposition of cultivated and wild land, but reverses the format. Woodcutter foregrounds the uncultivated land and the ‘loitering’ peasantry, and recesses the ploughing ‘industrious mechanic’ (to rehearse Gilpin’s terms), while Peasant Ploughing foregrounds the act of cultivation. The ploughman breaks up the earth into neat corrugations, with lines of rich brown furrows, while behind him the non-human agencies, time and weather, have broken open the high bank to expose a treasury of rose, coral and sandy tints – an agricultural version of the opposition of Price’s negative gardening to Brown’s ‘smoothing and levelling’. 74

Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s Englishness

27 Thomas Gainsborough, Peasant Ploughing with Two Horses, 1750–53, oil on canvas.

The agenda in the Woodcutter painting is further complicated by the sense that its most arresting visual impact is made by objects that seem to have little to do with the human activities: the ancient tree and the bright cow. The tree rears its sharply lit carbuncular mass into the sky, its mutilated arms flung back like some arboreal martyr. It is painted with such concentrated detail that it seems designed to upstage the figures and scenes elsewhere in the picture. Perhaps it was; Gainsborough observed that the figures in his landscapes are there only to create ‘a little business for the Eye to be drawn from the Trees in order to return to them with more glee’. Whatever its formal picturesque appeal, that little scene of the young courting couple partly girdled by the hollow

75

a sweet view trunk of an ancient tree carried a moral reassurance. The scarified veteran is putting out spring foliage on its surviving limbs as it cradles the lovers, and that offers an image of continuity: decay, death and rebirth. The young and the old, the pristine and the weather-worn cohabit the landscape, and the binaries extend into the juxtaposition of cultivation and the wild. And is that arresting, battered veteran part of the ‘image of old England’? The oak was traditionally an emblem of English strength. This dualism becomes a marked theme in the fashioning of the identity of specifically English countryside. The ‘truly English . . . national look’ remarked on by Cunningham in 1829 is now not just a matter of opposing or juxtaposing picturesque ‘old England’ with modernized and ‘improved’ England, but of experimentally assimilating the two within a single frame. One painter who managed such scenes with some deftness was Peter De Wint, ‘The only artist that produces real English scenery’, according to John Clare. Clare longed to possess one of De Wint’s low-key naturalistic landscapes, as he wrote to his publisher, John Taylor: ‘any thing in his [De Wint’s] own way will gratifye me a landscape with out a living object upon it or above it with an old dotterel tree [a stumpy pollarded tree] or two throwing their huge bulks from the hedges into the light or a few bushes or a gleam of greensward heath or meadow . . . I care not what it is so it be english.’

‘I fancy I see Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree,’ Constable recorded in 1799. He was in his early twenties when he wrote this to his mentor, J. T. Smith. ‘Antiquity’ Smith, keeper of prints at the British Museum, is a figure we have already met; he was the author of Remarks on Rural Scenery (1797), the guidebook for artists that had strongly recommended native cottage scenery as a subject to replace the conventional castles and ruined abbeys 76

Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s Englishness

28 John Constable, Cottage among Trees, c. 1795, graphite and grey wash.

favoured by the picturesque tourist-artists. Constable was listed as one of the book’s subscribers. Smith had asked the young artist to do some local research on his fellow East Anglian, Gainsborough, and to keep an eye out for promising cottage scenes. In response Constable had sent Smith some of his earliest work, drawings of local Suffolk cottages (illus. 28). As well as enjoying Smith’s contagious interest in Dutch landscapes, the young Constable familiarized himself with the contemporary picturesque debates of the 1790s and the repertoire of rough, weathered motifs that the English picturesque had brought into prominence. He read Gilpin’s Three Essays and Price’s Essay. He came to know De Wint personally, and gave him encour­­ agement. He also knew the literature of associationism and had a particular enthusiasm for Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste. Association and local attachment were the main impetus behind Constable’s publication Various Subjects of Landscape, Characteristic of English Scenery (1830–33), commonly known by its short title, English Landscape Scenery. It consisted of a series of 77

a sweet view mezzotints based on his own paintings and accompanied by some letterpress. His aims were set out in the Introduction: to increase the interest for, and promote the study of, the Rural Scenery of England, with all its endearing associations, its amenities, and even in its most simple localities; abounding as it does in grandeur, and every description of Pastoral Beauty: England, with her climate of more than vernal freshness, and in whose summer skies, and rich autumnal clouds, the observer of Nature may daily watch her endless varieties of effect. Constable’s promotion of the status of English rural scenery deliberately included the ‘most simple localities’ for their endearing personal associations. In this respect, he had marked affinities with De Wint, to whom he once wrote, ‘I am fully aware of the kind manner in which you always speak of my attempts as a “brother in landscape”.’ Although he included some subjects that ‘marked historical events of our middle ages’, his main landscapes were taken from what he called ‘home scenery’ – quiet stretches of river, cottages, mills, scenes of ploughing and haymaking – and mostly from the countryside of Dedham Vale. This was in marked contrast to Turner’s contemporaneous pictorial version of England, Picturesque Views in England and Wales (1825–38), a series of published plates engraved after his watercolours (illus. 29, 30). Turner’s England in this publication was pretty consistently of the ‘heroic’ kind (to adopt Smith’s designation): castles, abbeys, cathedrals, ancient cities, stirring seascapes. Constable, on the other hand, designed his prints to further that championship of ordinary English rural scenery that had got under way more than half a century before, but with the added impetus of sentimental association and local attachment. Constable’s landscape art brings together and refocuses many of the developments we have been considering. His inheritance 78

29 Thomas Jeavons, after J.M.W. Turner, ‘Arundel Castle and Town, Sussex’, 1834, engraving from J.M.W. Turner, Picturesque Views in England and Wales, part xviii, no. 2 (1827–38). 30 David Lucas, after John Constable, ‘East Bergholt, Suffolk’, 1831, mezzotint in the series Various Subjects of Landscape, Characteristic of English Scenery.

a sweet view from the picturesque vogue includes but goes beyond those clichéd rustic motifs – the cottage, the old broken gate, weathered farm wagon or gypsy figures (features that he referred to cynically as ‘eye-salve’ to help the market appeal of his paintings). Just as he relished both the Dutch school of landscape (thanks to Smith’s encouragement) and Claude’s work (regardless of the Academy’s polarization of the two), so his career brings into rapprochement the old near-feral picturesque and the new ‘English comfort’ pictur­ esque, in terms of the countryside motifs he works again and again. I want to conclude with a closer focus on the way two of his

31 John Constable, The Vale of Dedham, 1828, oil on canvas.

80

Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s Englishness

Dedham Vale landscapes achieve this, The Vale of Dedham (1828) and The Cornfield (1826). The Vale of Dedham was exhibited in 1828 (illus. 31). Constable had painted the same view of the Vale in 1802 (taken from Gun Hill, Langham, and looking towards Dedham village and church), but in this later version he added the foreground figure of the gypsy mother and child beside their tent. From the late eighteenth century Gainsborough and George Morland had been introducing gypsy subjects into some of their landscapes, and thereby they became staple features in the vogue for the picturesque in the 1790s. They lingered into the nineteenth century, as ‘part and parcel of the landscape scenery of England . . . an essential portion of our poetry and literature’, according to William Howitt, the chronicler of The Rural Life of England (1838). But they were at the same time a social reality in the English countryside. Richard Jefferies came across this scene on one of his winter walks: ‘The common is an open piece of furze and heath at the verge of the forest; and here, in a tent just large enough to creep in, the gypsy woman had borne twins in the midst of the snow and frost.’ It is almost exactly the scene in Constable’s foreground. Where Gainsborough had positioned his two Englands side by side (modern times and timeless pastoral, cultivation and common land, smoothness and roughness), Constable organized his binary in a vertical composition. The gypsy’s habitat is set amid rampantly wild vegetation, rendered with Constable’s loosest and freest handling. In this brambly imaging of (presumably) wild common land, the mother crouches against the broken bank. She and the tent represent the bottom rung in a hierarchy of three human constructions in the painting’s central vertical axis. At the top, breaking the horizon, is the church tower, hinging heaven and earth. Below that come the neat valley dwellings straddling the river, the pollarded willows and the sunlit water meadows with grazing cattle; and below those huddles the nomadic social 81

a sweet view outcast by her tent. The composition combines sedative riposo and the stimulus of picturesque irritation, ‘English comfort’ next to a patch of rugged wild land. The separate domains of ordered, prosperous valley and wild foreground are reinforced by distinctions in the handling, with relatively smooth brushwork marking out the character of the former, and exuberantly vagabond brushstrokes evoking the spirit and texture of the latter. This is Constable’s ‘pittoresco’. Constable’s enthusiasm for Claude at times amounted to infatuation. ‘I have slept with one of the Claudes every night,’ he sheepishly confessed to his wife in the autumn of 1823, when he spent some weeks at Coleorton Hall, the home of Sir George Beaumont. (This is the same Beaumont whose gardens had been designed with Uvedale Price’s advice thirty years before.) At Coleorton Constable had the opportunity to study Beaumont’s magnificent collection of Claude landscapes, those that were later to form the foundation of the National Gallery’s collection. They included one that Constable was particularly drawn to, Landscape with Goatherd and Goats, ‘the little Grove’ as he called it. It is an unusual Claude, a largely closed scene without the familiar spacious, bright passage through to a deep horizon. Constable’s verdict on it (or perhaps on the meticulous oil copy he made) is very striking: ‘It contains almost all that I wish to do in landscape.’ He described it as ‘a noon day scene – which “warms and cheers but which does not inflame or irritate” – Mr Price. [It] diffuses a life & breezy freshness into the recess of trees which make it enchanting.’ The citation of ‘Mr Price’ referred to Price’s discussion of il riposo di Claudio and the counter-attractions of visual irritation, variations on the familiar theme of smoothness versus roughness, which we have been exploring in this chapter. Three years later Constable painted The Cornfield of 1826 (illus. 32). He called it ‘a close lane, kind of thing’, an extensive shady ‘recess of trees’, like the Goatherd, and he used much the same 82

32 John Constable, ‘Landscape’ (The Cornfield), 1826, oil on canvas.

a sweet view description as he had recorded in his delight with Claude’s landscape: ‘The trees . . . are shaken by a pleasant and healthfull breeze.’ From Claude he took the warming and cheering riposo of the Goatherd, but infused it with ‘a breezy freshness’ not usually discerned as a characteristic of Claude’s landscapes, though very much a signature element in Constable. His landscapes may not ‘inflame or irritate’, but they introduce a new energy into old Claudean structures, one that brings to the scene a sensuous stimulus akin to a degree of irritation. Natural forces give this scene its invigorating roughness, its ‘variety of tints and forms’, its broken lines.The freshening breeze tousles the trees and sends cloud shadows racing across the fields, visibly ‘Sweeping with shadowy gust the fields of corn’. Constable chose to add this quotation from James Thomson’s Seasons (with two other lines) to the catalogue entry for Cornfield; the italics are Constable’s. Typically, he’s drawn to the movement of light it describes. I would guess it was the synaesthetic ‘shad­ owy gust’ that really seized his imagination – that and the fact that this was a portrait of a lane with personal sentimental associations from his childhood. The Cornfield is a noon landscape, a time of day Constable particularly favoured. With the sun high overhead, its light falls with maximum brightness on land and water, turning the cornfield into a golden glare, making the leaves and pond scintillate, and silvering the slimy posts. In other paintings shoals of light gush from his opening lock gates and mill races. The most ordinary places vibrate with brilliance, and people felt Constable’s weather. He brought a haptic visuality into English landscape representation, a degree of that welcome irritation that Price insisted was part of the picturesque experience: English comfort with a refreshing sensuous vitality. Several contemporaries testified to this. His friend and biographer Charles Robert Leslie particularly admired one of Constable’s Hampstead Heath views:

84

Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s Englishness

I know no picture in which the mid-day heat of Midsummer is so admirably expressed; and were not the eye refreshed by the shade thrown over a great part of the foreground by some young trees . . . and the cool blue of water . . . one would wish . . . for a parasol, as Fuseli wished for an umbrella when standing before one of Constable’s showers. A friend of the painter once commissioned a landscape in which ‘he could feel the wind blowing on his face’, because that was Constable’s speciality. Some riposo-prone critics clearly found his English scenes altogether too much of an irritant: ‘Not one inch of repose is to be found any where,’ complained one spectator: ‘Plants, foliages, sky, timber, stone, every thing, are all contesting for individual notice, all curled and insipid, and powdered with white.’ This critic was reviewing a major stock-taking exhibition, ‘Living Artists of the English School’, held at the British Institution in 1825: ‘the first time in the history of British art, that the public has been enabled to judge fairly of the merits of our own artists’. Constable had three paintings on display, and was awarded one small, dismissive paragraph by the critic, who recoiled from the painter’s ‘peculiar affection for the dullest of subjects’. The disparaging remark echoes Thomas Batchelor’s dismissive line about unimproved, unenclosed England: ‘In those dull scenes, unheeded, and unknown’. But this was exactly the scenery that Constable was promoting. He had declared in 1823 that his art was ‘to be found under every hedge, and in every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth picking up’. Nobody picked up Constable’s Cornfield, either. It was ahead of its time, even though it drew on the past. Unsold, it remained in the painter’s own collection until his death in 1837. It was then bought by a number of subscribers and given to the National Gallery – the first picture to be presented to the nation by public 85

a sweet view subscription. There were more than a hundred subscribers, and they came from many areas of cultural life, from local Suffolk acquaintances to national figures such as the painters William Etty and Clarkson Stanfield, the scientist Michael Faraday, and William Wordsworth. Donating it to the National Gallery seemed an appropriate way to widen the appeal of this Suffolk scene with its personal associations, to make the local national. By the middle of the nineteenth century this artist’s attachment to his particular country scenery was becoming identified with the nation’s sense of its own ‘local attachment’. Keeping faith with the pictur­ esque of Gainsborough and Price and their love of neglected nooks and wilder scenery, Constable’s landscapes blended Old England with a working, productive contemporary scene, reconciling neglected common land with farmed fields, so as to produce his ‘genuine English scenery’. Viewers could thus take what they wanted from his landscapes, according to their own sense of what England was: Look at any or all of his [Constable’s] pictures and see how England rises before us – England in all her wealth of picturesque beauty – not ‘trimmed and frounced,’ not clipped and cropped as the corn-manufacturers disfigure her; but English nature as it holds its own in our rude heaths and ferny commons, and as it reasserts itself in every forsaken nook or neglected corner where, left alone awhile, it breaks loose from the bonds of cultivation, and bursts into a wild weedage of teazle and burdock, a rich growth of foliage and wild flowers such as few other lands can boast.

86

three

The Domestication of Picturesque England, 1800–1860

L

eslie Stephen, the critic and biographer (and father of Virginia Woolf), settled into what he described in 1867 as ‘the loveliest place in all England’. It was Henley-on-Thames: [It is] cultivated, and in the way of tamed, quiet scenery, gardens and parks, and trim meadows and old-fashioned country inns and quiet houses nothing can beat it that I know . . . The beauties are humble, but of a soothing, almost soporific nature. In short it is the essence of domestic English scenery . . . and the most English and most lovely of all . . . a little ivy-covered, romantic cottage . . . with a pretty little garden, and a view over the meadows and the river . . . It is small scenery, but exquisitely finished and pleasant to live in.

Stephen’s description and evaluation of the Henley landscape as the ‘essence of domestic English scenery’ suggest the character of the sweet view by the middle of the Victorian period. Quite how it arrived there from the increasingly vexed picturesque views popularized by Gilpin, Price and Gainsborough is a question this chapter will address.

87

a sweet view

The Two Pictures and the ‘national look’ Nooks, glades, stag-headed oaks, deep-rutted lanes, mossy cottages and barns, ‘every deep recess – every bold projection – the fantastic roots of trees – the winding paths of sheep’: these, as we have seen, formed the distinctive repertoire of picturesque English scenery. Thanks to Gainsborough, this was acclaimed as the country’s ‘national look’, ‘the image of old England’, to be distinguished from the Claudean versions of its countryside popularized in the paintings of Richard Wilson and his colleagues. Picturesque landscape according to Uvedale Price was essentially unimproved landscape, rough, worn, weathered and retaining continuity with a distant past. That last characteristic was emblematized in the ancient oaks and sheep tracks, and the long-naturalized cottages and barns with roofs of thatch or slate that hosted lichen and grasses and nesting sites. The latter signs of hospitality to the natural world were particularly poignant; they betokened a human world once shared with nature, but now one from which the urbanized English felt alienated, and to which they were beginning to return as tourist visitors. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the challenge to this version of Old England vernacular no longer came from Mediterranean beau ideal or sublimity but from Modern England. Picturesque Old England asserted itself in resistance to the England of the fashionable new parkland plantations, smoothed landscapes ruled into grids and transformed by new agricultural technology, the rapidly proliferating road system (29,000 kilometres/18,000 mi. of turnpike roads by 1821), the raw new villas of the wealthy and the spreading terraces of new housing pushing out into the countryside. Soon it was also to be the railways, snaking out across the country and generating their own infrastructure of new stations and hotels, swelling the suburbs and turning remote hamlets and villages into small towns. 88

The Domestication of Picturesque England

Changes of this kind were irresistible. They were inevitably part of the progressive ‘national look’ as England slowly recovered after the wars with France – recovered economically, as well as in morale. The anti-modernizing picturesque was forced into compromise; Old England had to come to terms with the renovation of the country in order to construct a sense of national identity that welcomed progress while still reassuring its people that continuity would not be lost. A foretaste of this comes in Charlotte Smith’s poem ‘Beachy Head’ (1807). Smith, like Jane Austen, was a devotee of William Cowper (‘having read “The Task” almost incessantly from its first publication to the present time’, as she wrote in dedicating a book to him). She sounds the familiar eighteenth-century themes of patriotic defiance against military and cultural threats from ‘modern Gallia’, from the ‘enervate sons of Italy’ and from ‘Superstition’s monkish weed’, before moving on to celebrate the sturdy independence of the English peasantry from the contamination of Luxury. ‘Beachy Head’ opens out a picture of southern English countryside (Surrey and Sussex) as the ema­ na­tion of this national character, striking what are becoming the familiar keynotes – ‘little’, ‘simple’, ‘rude’, ‘modest’. It was this countryside that was to become by the end of the century the idealized ‘South Country’, so often taken to be the Heart of England: The prospect widens, and the village church But little, o’er the lowly roofs around Rears its gray belfry, and its simple vane; Those lowly roofs of thatch are half concealed By the rude arms of trees, lovely in spring, When on each bough, the rosy-tinctur’d bloom Sits thick, and promises autumnal plenty. ... 89

a sweet view Where woods of ash, and beech, And partial copses, fringe the green hill foot, The upland shepherd rears his modest home, There wanders by, a little nameless stream That from the hill wells forth, bright now and clear, Or after rain with chalky mixture gray, But still refreshing in its shallow course, The cottage garden; most for use design’d, Yet not of beauty destitute. The vine Mantles the little casement; yet the briar Drops fragrant dew among the July flowers; . . . There honeysuckles flaunt, and roses blow Almost uncultured.

That phrase ‘Almost uncultured’ captures the delicate compromise that is being constructed for English scenery, a compromise between the domesticated and the wild. The same tension is present in the qualifications ‘most for use design’d,/ Yet not of beauty destitute’. This reconciles the old incompatibility between picturesque beauty and utility fostered by Gilpin and reinforced by Price in some of his gardening programme. The poet does have a fondness for the ‘rudest’ (that is to say, uncultivated) beauties of English scenery, but they are scenes of relative picturesque neglect – a moderated version of the rough, robust picturesque of Price’s forest scenery. Smith’s neglected lanes and common land are embroidered with flowers, so that they seem little more than sweet extensions of the cottage scenery she has described: I loved her rudest scenes – warrens, and heaths, And yellow commons, and birch-shaded hollows, And hedge rows, bordering unfrequented lanes Bowered with wild roses, and the clasping woodbine Where purple tassels of the tangling vetch 90

The Domestication of Picturesque England

With bittersweet, and bryony inweave, And the dew fills the silver bindweed’s cups.

33 Isaac Cruikshank, French Happiness – English Misery, 1793, satirical print.

Picturesque, Gainsborough-inspired countryside, as it edges towards the rough sublime in Price and then becomes softened in Charlotte Smith’s southern English scenery, is one version of England to emerge from the French wars. It is one that asserts little or no rupture with its pre-industrial past. The other version is epitomized in a small propagandist publication that appeared three years after ‘Beachy Head’, in 1810. Earnestly recommended to the attention of every ‘true Briton’, this pamphlet was entitled The Two Pictures; or, A View of the Miseries of France Contrasted with the Blessings of England. There had been a tradition of such ‘two-pictures’ propaganda publications during the French wars, especially by graphic satirists such as James Gillray and the Cruikshanks. The illustration reproduced here (illus. 33) shows a

91

a sweet view starving France beside a well-fed England, and through the English window is a benign landscape of ploughing and sowing. The pamphlet’s title page carried an epigraph from ‘Rule Britannia’: ‘The nations not so blest as thee’. In the course of its stridently patriotic contrasts, Two Pictures included a description of the English countryside designed to throw into sharp relief the grim destitution of its French counterpart: The neat cottage, the substantial farm-house, the splendid villa, are constantly rising to the sight, surrounded by the most choice and poetical attributes of the landscape . . . [A picture of] neatness, softness, and elegance, is exposed to the eye, . . . The vision is not more delightfully recreated by the rural scenery, than the moral sense is gratified, and the understanding elevated by the institutions of this great country. The English countryside here, from its peasantry to its patriciate, is an image of national prosperity and political and moral stability. The cottage’s ‘neat’ character signifies a contented and disciplined peasantry, with no cause at all to foment social revolution. The farmhouse is ‘substantial’, as befits one of the engine rooms for national economic health and plenty. The cultural glory of the country is evident in the splendour of its elegant ‘villas’. All classes are contributing in their different ways to producing a rural emblem of English ‘Blessings’: neat, soft, elegant and morally gratifying. This is now the propagandist function incumbent on imagemakers of the ‘national look’ as they reconsider the native rural scene. The England they promote is no longer compatible with the old picturesque model, which had tried to rescue its countryside beauties from modernization. The Pricean imagery of cherished rural neglect is now associated with blighted France, and so post-war England must construct a new sense of itself. 92

The Domestication of Picturesque England

According to the historian Linda Colley, England had experienced a profound loss of direction in its identity. The long succession of wars with France had, she argues, forged a sense of national unity against a common enemy and distracted attention from the nation’s internal divisions and tension, so much so that ‘war . . . had been the making of Great Britain.’ In the absence of the great hostile Other after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, that sense of national identity was perforce tested by introspection. It appeared more fragile than expected. Anti-Catholic tension, pressure for reform of political representation, and the intensification of the anti-slavery movement threatened the establishment by undermining those frequent boasts of the ‘free’ condition of the English people that had rung out from the many propaganda sheets during the war. Added to such political anxiety were the depressed economic conditions in the countryside as a third of a million men were demobilized and thrown on to the labour market over several years of poor harvests. Large-scale capitalist farming improved the agricultural yield for the country, but at the cost of the wellbeing of the country people. ‘The loss’, according to an article from 1816 reviewing a number of publications on poverty and population, ‘is that of a link in the social chain [as the small farmers] have been degraded into day labourers’. Their home ground has been cleared: [It] is more highly cultivated – the crooked hedge-rows have been thrown down – the fields are in better shape and of handsomer dimensions . . . but look at the noblest produce of the earth – look at the children of the soil . . . Old tenants have been cut down with as little remorse and as little discrimination as old timber, and the moral scene is in consequence as lamentably injured as the landscape.

93

a sweet view The social damage becomes integral to the changing aesthetics of landscape, and that jeopardizes the Gilpinesque wish to separate the picturesque eye from the moral sense. The whole situation was hard to reconcile with the picture of ‘the neat cottage’ and ‘the substantial farm-house’ supposed (by The Two Pictures) to be the keynote of contemporary English rural scenery. The depressed countryside was just as likely to resemble the old Pricean picturesque ideal, with ruined cottages, decaying farms and a vagrant peasantry – none of which would now gratify the sensibilities even of a connoisseurial squirearchy. The tension generated by the picturesque between aesthetics and social morality in the appreciation of landscape made for entertaining fictional debate, as Jane Austen recognized. In Sense and Sensibility (1811) there is some gentle sparring between Marianne Dashwood, the enthusiast for the vogueish picturesque, and Edward Ferrars, the champion of the countryside as a model of neatness, efficiency and elegance. Here is Edward (in ch. 43) dilating on the kind of English landscape he would call ‘a very fine country’: the hills are steep, the woods seem full of fine timber, and the valley looks comfortable and snug – with rich meadows and several neat farm houses scattered here and there. It exactly answers my idea of a fine country, because it unites beauty with utility – and I dare say it is a picturesque one too, because you admire it; I can easily believe it to be full of rocks and promontories, grey moss and brush wood, but these are all lost on me. I know nothing of the picturesque . . . I do not like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if they are tall, straight, and flourishing . . . I have more pleasure in a snug farm-house than a watch-tower, – and a troop of tidy, happy villagers please me better than the finest banditti in the world. 94

The Domestication of Picturesque England

34 Joseph Wood, after Salvator Rosa, The Hermit, 1744, etching.

Edward’s aesthetic judgement is married to his moral, economic and social values. A ‘fine country’ is one that, contrary to Gilpin’s principles, ‘unites beauty with utility’ (echoing Charlotte Smith’s more defensive ‘for use design’d,/ Yet not of beauty destitute’). The countryside and its farms and villages are there for human convenience. The woods are full of ‘fine timber’; they may look beautiful, but they will also provide the materials for building the villages and sustaining the British navy. Likewise the meadows are ‘rich’, burgeoning with well-tended crops for food. The farmhouses are ‘neat’, and neatness is a symptom of efficiency and productivity. The valley commends itself to Edward because it is comfortable and ‘snug’. That word ‘snug’ appears twice in Edward’s arguments; it is the antithesis to Marianne’s Salvatorian rocks and brushwood (illus. 34), and a concept that becomes inseparable from the Victorian rural idyll. The farming interest was fully in line with Edward in assessing what is needed to make a beautiful country, and broadly antithetical to the Gilpin-Price-Marianne picture of what constitutes 95

a sweet view rural attractiveness: shaggy, irregular hedges, old farm buildings and a cast of loitering peasants. William Dickinson’s Essay on the Agriculture of East Cumberland (1853) summarized the ‘improvements’ in post-enclosure Cumberland and their implications, and seems almost systematically to counter Gilpin’s picturesque prescriptions: Meadows began to appear where swamps existed before; plantations dotted the country where heather and whins [gorse] had formerly been; new farm-buildings were erected, and old ones renewed; straight fences were seen in contrast with the zig-zag hedges of the ancient inclosures; the varied stages of cultivation diversified and improved the aspect of the whole country . . . and along with all these changes the habits of the people were converted from the listless lounge of the halfshepherd, half-husbandman, to the active, industrious, and persevering quality of the agriculturist. Austen’s Englishness favoured moderation in all things. This value system extended to her priorities in landscape – the mix of cultivation and the natural, a controlled, modestly scaled and partially domesticated countryside that didn’t suffocate spontaneous natural energy. As we saw in Chapter One, Humphry Repton described the nation’s political constitution in two-pictures terms as ‘the happy medium betwixt the liberty of savages, and the restraint of despotic government’. It is in this context that one can understand the oscillations in Repton’s own theory and practice as a landscape gardener. In the late 1790s he quarrelled with Price and Payne Knight over their virulently anti-Brown picturesque. Repton (like Edward Ferrars) repudiated what he called ‘the cant language of connoisseurship’ and insisted (as a practitioner) on comfort, convenience and utility: ‘The Subjects represented by Salvator Rosa . . . are deemed picturesque; but are they fit objects 96

The Domestication of Picturesque England

to copy for the residence of man in a polished and civilized state? Certainly not.’ He championed the ‘neatness, simplicity, and elegance of English gardening’ against the Price-Knight aesthetic. However, he also came to lament the vulgarity of the new estates springing up in Regency England. These, in his view, were sacrificing ‘the picturesque shapes and harmonious tints of former times’ to ‘plantations of firs and larches and Lombardy poplars’ and ‘new red houses, with all the fanciful apertures of Venetian and pseudo-Gothic windows’. Faced with these developments, he relented somewhat in his hostility to the old picturesque. He even went so far as to admit, ‘I cannot wonder at the enthusiastic abhorrence which the author of The Landscape [Knight] expresses for modern Gardening.’ The characterizing of the English rural scene oscillated between the Pricean picturesque and the new landscape of agricultural and industrial improvement. But gradually the old rugged and feral picturesque was nudged away, associated with the un-English Salvatorian sublime and with the destitution of the French countryside. A modified, anglicized picturesque was clearing space for itself to accommodate the socialized countryside, with its unobtrusive, naturalized cultivation. The new picturesque tried to marry Old England (its lanes and sheep paths, its gypsies on the common, its ancient oaks and its weather-worn cottages) with the post-enclosures landscape of prospering farmland and neat, snugly nucleated villages (as opposed to the more dispersed kind of village, often straggling and haphazard with poorly built new cottages on badly drained land, a plain Methodist chapel instead of an ancient church steeple, and an unruly alehouse). All the time, too, picturesque Old England was trying to find some accommodation with the spread of towns as they engulfed the countryside. In 1854 Thomas Miller, a writer on country life, published Turner and Girtin’s Picturesque Views of English, Scotch and Welsh Scenery, Sixty Years Since. The last part of the title deliberately 97

a sweet view echoes Walter Scott’s romantically retrospective Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814). That dating phrase is significant as an emphasis, for massive and disorientating transformations to the countryside were happening over just a generation or two. Miller used engravings of the work of these two artists as instruments for galvanizing nostalgia – nostalgia for the 1790s, the heyday of the old picturesque. By implication in his pictures, and explicitly in his letterpress, he is rehearsing the two-pictures schema that we have seen activated in a variety of forms to mark the passage of time as the face of England is transformed. Here is Miller poring over a view of Woolwich (illus. 35) by Thomas Girtin, taken from a drawing made in spring 1798: Look at this beau ideal of a country road, with its Arcadian cart, and quaintly-dressed rustics, and sand-banks, and bushes tumbling about in all directions, and encroaching where they like, without the slightest fear of billhook or spade. Look at that undulating expanse, beyond the straggling hedgerow; no straight lines there, all curves – true lines of beauty! Think of the blackberries on all those hedges, and the hazel-nuts in the

35 John Walker, after Thomas Girtin, ‘Woolwich’, engraving published in The Itinerant, 1 May 1798.

98

The Domestication of Picturesque England

copses, and ask yourself if this is not truly English – the England of sixty years since? Once again, we meet that recoil from straight lines. Miller’s imperatives – ‘Look at . . .’, ‘Think of . . .’ – raise the temperature of nostalgia for the ‘truly English’. He relishes scenery where forms tumble about, ‘undulating . . . straggling . . . all curves’. It is diffi­ cult to overestimate the sense of oppressiveness people must have felt in the face of England’s massive environmental changes, and therefore how highly charged these images of lost landscapes could be. Much of that emotional charge is channelled into the concept of the ‘picturesque’. At times the term assumed a kind of omnium gatherum responsibility for representing a whole way of life, fading away rapidly. For that reason it became essential to the construction of the rural idyll that it should preserve the old, as an antithesis to the new environment: ‘no bosky dells, home of the freckled foxglove,’ continues Miller, ‘no mossy “bank, where­­­on the wild thyme blows;” only banks of deposit, with which poets, and such like poor people have nothing to do. No commons for cows, and geese, and donkeys; but very “short commons” [an old expression for meagre rations] for all common folk.’ Old England is disappearing so fast that it will soon be recoverable only in antique books of prints, and these we should treasure: Rapidly as the face of our ‘tight little island’ is becoming changed, built upon, and bored through, and cut up in all sorts of ways; we shall very soon be glad to refer to them [books of old prints] as the only remembrances of the sweet rural aspect of things in the times gone by – of the woods and green fields, the leafy groves and purling streams, and all the beauties and delights of country scenery . . . [Our woods] are fast becoming, like St John’s Wood, all streets, and squares, and stacks of chimneys; the fields are turning into brickfields, the gardens 99

a sweet view into market gardens, where the only flowers are cauliflowers; the green hedgerows, alas! are fast disappearing, and all the old picturesque divisions of the landscape are being swept away. The picturesque became a conservationist shorthand for resistance to environmental change. However, Miller is also a staunch Victorian, accepting the age’s progressivist spirit in spite of his recognition of losses. For all his sentimental longing for the old world figured in Girtin’s scene, he had to acknowledge the benefits to people’s lives of what was happening in contemporary England – its manifest ‘progress and prosperity’: dearly as we love a bit of rural scenery, yet do we love our fellow-creatures more; and knowing that the ever-increasing millions cannot live upon song and sunshine, we rejoice to see all these means and appliances for their sustenance and comfort brought into operation, although they do disfigure the face of nature, and defile her green garb with smoke and the stain of burnt bricks. The two-pictures narrative that has shaped much of this exploration of the picturesque and English countryside runs as a succession of antitheses, sometimes merging in hybrid compromise, then veering apart, then morphing into another set of antagonists: classical Mediterranean landscape models versus English vernacular; neat and prosperous English countryside versus destitute rural France; Old England’s countryside versus new urban spread (as in Miller’s Sixty Years Since); Old England’s countryside versus modernized rural England. The landscape of England that established itself as an image of the national ideal by the 1820s was a complex and contested site, constituted by a multitude of cultural and political forces as the 100

The Domestication of Picturesque England

fit environment for the flourishing of the national character in the post-war period. You want to know the vaunted national character of the English? Look at the English countryside (in its flourishing manifestations). This third decade of the nineteenth century brought many a repetition of that directive. The picturesque of the 1790s, largely derived from Gainsborough’s landscapes with their cottage children, was increasingly modified by humane-spirited rejection of the aesthetics of poverty and the rise of a nationalistic Evangelicalism with its emphasis on good works, domestic neatness, comfort and orderliness. The landscape according to the patriotic propagandists had to be a functioning, productive countryside, and not a sentimentalized picture gallery of Old Rural Life. The rural scenery of pre-industrial England was anyway simply disappearing. John Constable lamented in 1825, ‘There will soon be an end to the picturesque in the kingdom,’ when he heard of the destruction by fire of an old Dorset watermill that he had cherished a few years earlier. This sense of the picturesque as an endangered scenic species is rehearsed quite often. Here, for instance, is a warning in 1824 from William Henry Pyne’s Somerset House Gazette, a ‘Weekly Miscellany of Fine Arts, Antiquities, and Literary Chit Chat’: The tourist in search of the picturesque is disappointed, on entering an ancient town, when looking for projecting stories, grotesque quoins, oaken rafters, and crazy casements, with plastered gables, he finds the buildings here and there cockney­ fied, with smooth brick walls, modern sashes, and shop-front . . . alas! for the tourist, the topographer, and the amateur of the picturesque. Consequently artists and writers set out to record this endangered species of antique urban architecture (illus. 36), just as Thomas Miller had resurrected Old England in prints. 101

a sweet view Later the same year the Gazette reviewed Peter Frederick Robinson’s Rural Architecture; or, A Series of Designs for Orna­ mental Cottages (1823): It has been remarked, that in proportion as the love of the picturesque has encreased, the objects which constitute its most engaging features have decreased . . . It is true that many inconveniences are removed at the expence of the picturesque. The painter delights in deep ruts, hollow trees, and houses hoary with age. The farmer, on the contrary, finds the superior convenience of the turnpike road, his advantage in growing timber, and encreased comfort in the modern dwelling. The balancing out of the hybridized portraiture of England was necessary as the face of the country changed quite rapidly. The revisions to the picturesque were needed in order to incorporate a reassuring continuity of old English rural traditions, not its wholesale displacement by machine modernity. This meant accommodating and trying to reconcile the old oppositional terms: thus pastoral and georgic, the ‘loitering peasant’ and the ‘industrious mechanic’, roughness and smoothness, the wild and the cultivated. As this tension between Old England and modernizing England was being negotiated, there was a sharpened interest in how outsiders perceived the national character in landscape terms.

The foreign visitor’s view The recorded reflections of early nineteenth-century visitors to England made significant and influential contributions to the debate about the nation’s sense of identity as expressed by its countryside. One in particular, from Washington Irving, needs some attention here. Visitors from overseas are usually most struck 102

The Domestication of Picturesque England

36 George Cuitt (ii), Untitled (An Old Half-timbered House in Chester), 1810, etching.

by the scenic contrasts to their own countries, and they tend to hallmark England’s landscapes with those qualities missing in their homeland; their published impressions then contribute to characterizing the distinctive nature of her rural scenery for the English. Here is one example of what constituted the ‘prevailing character of English scenery’, from a Scottish tourist in 1818: Repose seems to me to be the prevailing character of English scenery. I was for some time at a loss to account for a certain stillness and want of interest with which, amid all the richness of English landscape, I felt myself oppressed; and I am indebted for the solution to the observation of a lady here, who lived a considerable time in Scotland, and is a great admirer of every thing Scottish. She said to me one day, that she thought there was a sleepiness about England which you never observed in Scotland. 103

a sweet view A settled repose (not quite the glowing serenity of il riposo di Claudio) and a benign comfort in the look and feel of the landscape continued to count among the most striking characteristics for many foreigners in this period. England’s beauties, as Leslie Stephen remarked, are of an ‘almost soporific nature’. Around the same time as the Scottish tourist was reporting his experiences, an American visitor’s version of rural England was bringing into sharp focus those vernacular landscape constituents highlighted by the later picturesque. This was Washington Irving’s highly popular The Sketch-book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20), a book with an extraordinary critical reception in England. Irving left America for England in 1815. In the summer of 1819 he began to send back to America short stories and essays that were published over the next two years in the major cities there. The essays included vivid sketches of life in England. One of Irving’s closest companions on his travels around the country was Charles Robert Leslie, the painter, friend and biographer of Constable. Irving’s sketches were appealing enough for some of them to be pirated almost immediately by British literary magazines. One such was the piece entitled ‘Rural Life in England’ (illus. 37), published in July in America and surfacing in British journals shortly thereafter, reproduced either in full or in extensive quoted sections (for example, in the Scots Magazine on 1 September 1819; Chester Courant on 12 December 1820; Bristol Mercury in May 1820, with several issues containing admiring comments and copious extracts). Irving had arrived in England with a particular agenda. The newness of America as a political organization and his sense that the national character was still unformed made him curious about everything in England that was not American, such as its settled traditions. His England is accordingly constructed as a venerable antithesis to American newness (that relational construction of 104

The Domestication of Picturesque England

identity again): ‘My native country was full of youthful promise; Europe was rich in the accumulated treasures of age . . . I longed to . . . escape . . . from the commonplace realities of the present, and lose myself among the shadowy grandeurs of the past’ (12). It is that agenda, the otherness of England, that determines his focus in the Sketch-book. Accordingly, he enthusiastically recuperates a rural England that was already changing and passing into history, thereby proving the point quoted earlier (from the Somerset House Gazette): ‘that in proportion as the love of the picturesque has encreased, the objects which constitute its most engaging features have decreased.’ Irving accentuates the domesticated character of English landscape in contrast to the scenery of America, a landscape (for him) largely without human history: ‘[America’s] mighty lakes . . . her valleys, teeming with wild fertility; her tremendous cataracts, thundering in their solitudes; her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous verdure; . . . her trackless forests’ (12). Accordingly,

37 William Hart, ‘English Rural Scene’, illustration from Washington Irving, The Sketch-book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. – Artist’s Edition (1864).

105

a sweet view he draws attention first to English landscape gardening and park scenery as typical of the discreet cultivation that pervades so much of the country’s rural imagery. The influence of these patrician practices, he suggests, has percolated through to the lowest classes: The very laborer, with his thatched cottage and narrow slip of ground, attends to their embellishment. The trim hedge, the grass-plot before the door, the little flower-bed bordered with snug box, the woodbine trained up against the wall, and hanging its blossoms about the lattice; . . . all these bespeak the influence of taste, flowing down from high sources, and pervading the lowest levels of the public mind. If ever Love, as poets sing, delights to visit a cottage, it must be the cottage of an English peasant. (71) It is curious to suggest that the cottager’s habits of neatness derive from the exemplary domesticity of the aristocracy. But Irving (from the young republic of America) is determined to see a Tory version of English countryside, a mutually dependent squirearchy and peasantry with the vestigial spirit of benign feudalism fusing the classes. The cottage scenery described by Irving constitutes a rural idyll of a specifically English kind; for him it distils something distinctive in the English national character. Unlike America, England ‘does not abound in grand and sublime prospects, but rather in little home scenes of rural repose and sheltered quiet’ (that ‘repose’ again): ‘Every antique farm-house and moss-grown cottage is a picture: and as the roads are continually winding, and the view is shut in by groves and hedges, the eye is delighted by a continual succession of small landscapes of captivating loveliness’ (73). This reiteration of the delights of concentrated scenic variety that, as we saw, had been extolled by Gilpin as a national 106

The Domestication of Picturesque England

characteristic, is thus perfectly fitted for aficionados of the picturesque. The scale is important for Irving. England is a composition of small landscapes, a succession of ‘little home scenes’ with rich foregrounds, rather than extensive vistas of plains and mountains and forests. As to its personality, Irving remarks: ‘The great charm . . . of English scenery, is the moral feeling that seems to pervade it.’ That moral feeling is associated with ideas of settled order, with ‘hoary usage and reverend custom’: Every thing seems to be the growth of ages of regular and peaceful existence. The old church of remote architecture, with its low, massive portal; its gothic tower; its windows rich with tracery and painted glass, in scrupulous preservation . . . its tombstones, recording successive generations of sturdy yeomanry, whose progeny still plough the same fields, and kneel at the same altar – the parsonage, a quaint irregular pile, partly antiquated, but repaired and altered in the tastes of various ages and occupants – the stile and footpath leading from the churchyard, across pleasant fields, and along shady hedgerows, according to an immemorial right of way – the neighboring village, with its venerable cottages, its public green sheltered by trees. (74) The countryside everywhere bears the record of social life, so much so that the natural world seems scarcely distinguishable from the social environment. The ancient buildings (the church and parsonage) are so old as to seem semi-naturalized; the fields are still rights of way; the boundary hedgerows open freely to accommodate stiles. Irving sums up the effect of English rural scenery at the start of his final paragraph: ‘this sweet home-feeling’. That idyll defines the spirit of the English countryside that will dominate Victorian 107

a sweet view sensibilities. The countryside becomes the out-of-doors experience of ‘sweet home-feeling’. It externalizes the snug home into little rural scenes where the natural and the cultivated, the high and low in class, all blend harmoniously in relationships that were apparently established generations ago and continue still. It represents in soft focus all that the sharply focused culture of the big city is steadily undermining (as Irving identifies in the sketch’s opening paragraphs); English rural life and scenery stand for calm and continuity against hectic change, against ‘din and traffic’, ‘hurry and abstraction’, ‘casual and transient’ social relations (69). The British novels and travel books that Irving had read in America provided the template for his expectations of English scenery. It was that literary version for which he searched as he began his tour of England, and it was that selective anthology of scenic Englishness that he then published for propagation. It certainly made its mark. Irving’s ‘Rural England’ essay became a benchmark portrait of the character of English rural scenery. William Howitt invoked Irving’s sketches of English countryside within the first dozen pages of his Rural Life of England (1838): Irving’s mind was full of the inspiration of the character of England as he had found it in books . . . ‘As we sailed up the Mersey . . . My eye dwelt with delight on neat cottages, with their trim shrubberies and green grass-plots. I saw the mouldering ruin of an abbey overgrown with ivy, and the taper spire of a village church rising from the brow of a neighbouring hill – all were characteristic of England.’ This reinforcement of a distinctive, though narrowed, range of scenery was a powerful means of promoting a national character in landscape. The Sketch-book enjoyed wide circulation, both in its subsequent editions and in journals where, as we have seen, Irving was so frequently quoted. It was rapturously received by 108

The Domestication of Picturesque England

the most popular and influential British writers of the day. Eulogies appeared in the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine (where John Gibson Lockhart declared that Irving was ‘one of our first favourites’ among all writers in English); Byron, Walter Scott and Thomas Campbell were enthusiastic admirers, as was the young Charles Dickens. In Pickwick Papers, the Dingley Dell episodes (published in 1836–7, with the action backdated to the late 1820s) owed much to Irving’s sketches of old-fashioned English manorial hospitality and country scenery. The phenomenal popularity of Pickwick helped, in turn, to reinforce the idealized imagery of rural England. The same was true for the idyllic pastoral scenes that Dickens conjured up in his next three books, Oliver Twist (1837–9), Nicholas Nickleby (1838– 9) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). Of the last, John Ruskin complained: ‘It is evident the man is a thorough cockney, from his way of talking about hedgerows, and honeysuckles, and village spires; and in London, and to his present fields of knowledge, he ought strictly to keep for some time.’ But Ruskin, at that time dedicated to an austere naturalism, had no patience with (and made no allowance for) Dickens’s deliberate designing of rural scenery as a therapeutic prescription in his part-allegorical tales of persecuted childhood (the long-suffering Oliver, Smike and Little Nell). The countryside was to be a balm for overwrought citydwellers – the precise point made by Irving as he concluded his essay. When Little Nell and her grandfather arrive finally at a remote country village and its ancient church (ch. 46), it is as though she has reached the end of a long pilgrimage: They admired everything – the old grey porch, the mullioned windows, the venerable grave-stones dotting the green churchyard, the ancient tower, the very weathercock; the brown thatched roofs of cottage, barn, and homestead, peeping from among the trees; the stream that rippled by the distant 109

a sweet view watermill; the blue Welsh mountains far away. It was for such a spot the child had wearied in the dense, dark, miserable haunts of labour . . . and amidst the squalid horrors through which they had forced their way. This Irving-esque, restorative English countryside through which Little Nell travelled was absorbed week by week by about 300,000 readers, and Ruskin’s grudging comments were not going to impede the popularization of such imagery. This was one of the ways in which such scenery became lodged in the imagination as a comforting rural idyll. ‘A quiet, happy place’, says Nell, amid these surroundings, ‘a place to live and learn to die in’. That points to one logical end of the reconstructed English countryside idyll. As Leslie Stephen remarked of his Henley-on-Thames ‘essence’ of domestic English scenery, it is ‘of a soothing, almost soporific nature’; and the Scottish visitor we heard from earlier wrote of an oppressive ‘sleepiness about England’. The English countryside beau ideal for the Victorians is shaped as a tranquillized retirement from the frenetic modern world, and from constant change and

38 Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), ‘Nell Tending the Graves’, illustration from Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, published in Master Humphrey’s Clock, vol. ii (1841).

110

The Domestication of Picturesque England

upheaval (‘even change was old in that old place,’ observes the narrator of Nell’s ancient village). But retirement encourages stasis, a retreat from life – and the ultimate retirement is death. Once settled in her village, Nell takes to gardening the graves in the green churchyard (illus. 38) – ‘a place . . . to learn to die in’.

English comfort, snugness and smallness The picturesque of Gilpin and Price had been one that concentrated overtly on the visual pleasure and stimulus of landscape, on its formal properties, whatever covert agendas (conscious or not) lay behind that aesthetic. The main changes to the picturesque in the early nineteenth century are in the way it took on a moral dimension, repaired the divorce between beauty and utility, and made the rural scene redolent of the character of its inhabitants. It domesticated it in other ways, by insisting on its being snug and comfortable, sometimes to the extent of its becoming a locus amoenus for leaving life behind. These new properties of the English rural idyll come across clearly in one of the fullest postwar accounts of the nature of English rural scenery and its relation to national character, which appeared in the wake of Irving’s Sketch-book. The essay, ‘English Landscape’, was published in 1822 in the New Monthly Magazine, and seeks to identify the personality of the native landscape. The writer, who signs himself or herself simply ‘V’, opens with lines from Milton’s L’Allegro, and claims that the poet’s description epitomizes the unique national character of English landscape: Russet lawns and fallows gray, Where the nibbling flocks do stray, Mountains on whose barren breast The lab’ring clouds do often rest. 111

a sweet view Meadows trim with daisies pied, Shallow brooks and rivers wide. Towers and battlements it sees Bosom’d high in tufted trees.

The essayist’s viewpoint might be described as that of someone who may-not-know-much-about-art-but-knows-what-s/he-likes; it is not at all the posture of the connoisseur. The opening premise is a bold one: ‘This peculiar character [of English landscape], that Englishmen are accustomed to from infancy, is the standard by which they try all rural objects abroad, and creates a disposition in them to undervalue foreign scenery, when it may be far superior to their own in the eye of taste.’ That viewpoint implicitly subscribes to associationist thinking in its argument about how familiarity with such scenery from infancy onwards determines the prejudices in favour of English landscape. Acquired ‘taste’ would not change that. What was it, then, that marked out the special character of the English scene, according to the essayist? ‘There is a snugness, a comfort, an agreeable circumscription in the look of the country dwellings of the gentry, and all but the very lowest class, which has something attractive and endearing in it, like that which is implied in the epithet “little”*, when used in kindness.’ The asterisked ‘little’ refers the reader to a passage in Edmund Burke’s Enquiry, where he lists the attributes of beauty (smallness, smoothness, gradual variation, delicacy and so forth). Burke argued that beauty thus constituted stimulates our love (whereas the sublime forces our awed admiration) by its submissiveness to our control: ‘we submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us.’ English scenery accordingly now has this character of loveable submissiveness and smallness of scale, both of which are conditions that also afford (or enable) snugness and comfort. It is a domesticated landscape. 112

The Domestication of Picturesque England

The salience of this appealing smallness is hard to overestimate in these characterizations of English scenery. Thus, the essayist argues, we may ‘admire’ large forests, huge buildings and great open tracts of country, ‘but we cannot love them’: Close high-fenced fields surrounded by trees, houses buried in shrubberies and groves, beautiful cattle feeding among rich pasturages, and all in the smallest space, so that the eye can command them together, take a hold on the affections that an uninclosed country, large forests, and immense buildings, can never attain. An ‘uninclosed country’ cannot take a hold on our affections? This imperiously inclusive ‘we’ takes no account of the lingering animosity to enclosure (John Clare, for example, would have no truck with these aesthetic preferences, nor, later and for different reasons, would Ruskin). On the contrary, ‘we’ positively welcome the neatly parcelled, hedgerow-bordered scenes emerging from decades of enclosure acts: ‘The idea of comfort which they afford is an additional tie to our regard.’ An enclosure landscape created the snugness that was to be such a keynote of English country scenery. Added to this, the late eighteenth-century enthusiasm for a ‘cottage system’, whereby every rural cottage should have a parcel of land attached to it, duplicated in miniature the largerscale parcelling up of the landscape. The obsession with comfort was very marked in the early nineteenth century, and not easy to account for. William Hazlitt explained it as a compensatory construct: ‘The English are certainly the most uncomfortable of all people in themselves, and therefore it is that they stand in need of every kind of comfort and accommodation.’ Snugness and comfort became key criteria for judging the distinctive attractions of English countryside. Two travellers to the 113

a sweet view other side of the world invoked this ideal as they surveyed the character of the new settlements in Sydney, Australia, in the early 1830s. England, for them, was ‘the only land (perhaps) in which genuine comfort can be found as the pervading genius loci, of houses, villages, towns, and cities – for comfort in England is not merely a fire-side companion on a winter evening, but “a presence” in which we feel ourselves every day and every where.’ John Hobhouse, Byron’s travelling companion on his tours to Greece and Turkey in 1809–10, made the same point in his travel journal: ‘Properly speaking, the word comfort cannot be applied to any thing I ever saw out of England, which any one in my place, who was not afraid of being taken for a downright prejudiced national blockhead, would confess.’ Ruskin, on the other hand, recoiled from the idea of a landscape dominated by such qualities: ‘there is a sense of something inexpressible, except by the truly English word “snug”, in every nook and sheltered lane . . . [the outcome of the prevailing English] spirit of well-principled housemaids.’ ‘English comfort’, we might recall, was one of the three constituents of Emma Woodhouse’s ‘sweet view’. By the early Victorian period it had become intimately associated with the idea of the sanctity of home – a ‘joyful nook of heaven in an unheavenly world’, as one later Victorian clergyman put it. The idea of the home as a snug nook, the nursery of virtue, protected from the noisy, public world, transferred itself to the idealized countryside. ‘Little home scenes’ composed the dominant character of English rural scenery for Irving. What he called ‘this sweet home-feeling’ refashioned the old pastoral idyll for a mass-urbanized populace in an age of rampant commercialism and fading religious belief. The ‘English Landscape’ essayist goes on to suggest that these ideas of comfort pervaded the countryside’s visible features, its ‘smiling fertility’ and shower-fed verdure, densely foliaged (‘tufted’) trees, ‘luxuriant vegetation’, huge oaks stretching out their ‘knotty arms’, and graceful parkland (‘made without an 114

The Domestication of Picturesque England

appearance of art’). This is a vista of nature’s bounty in which even the horticulture seems natural and spontaneous in its benign appearance. The argument in all its ambivalence and complexity reflects in miniature the struggles of two or three generations to articulate the appeal of English scenery and identify its idiosyncratic attractions, to minimize its defects (such as its relative lack of the wild and sublime) and maximize its amenities as aesthetic and moral advantages. As in Irving’s Sketch-book, the essayist detects an intimate relationship, indeed a symbiotic one, between English rural scenery and its influence on English character: ‘The sober, snug appearance of English retirements in the country is favourable to the development of the qualities of the heart . . . congenial to thought and reflection . . . [To] the love of rural life . . . we owed, and yet owe, much of the steadiness and simplicity of the English character.’ This supposed native capacity for thought­fulness and reflection, steadiness and simplicity, was particularly nurtured by the kind of seclusion typical in English rural scenery. That is part of the writer’s peculiar insistence on the psychological benefits of ‘a circumscribed field of view’. England with its pattern of enclosures was by this period uniquely well endowed with such spaces: How favourable to meditation are our sequestered plantations and fields. The high green hedges, well lined with timber, and almost peculiar to our island, divide the face of the country in a very unpicturesque manner, but they inclose many natural gardens, many delicious spots isolated each from the other, carpetted with the softest vegetation, and seeming to be made for study and gentle exercise at the same time. England has become a land of small, ‘natural gardens’, havens of softly hedged seclusion. The use of the term ‘unpicturesque’ here is significant. It is most probably a reference to Gilpin’s antagonism 115

a sweet view towards property boundaries that formally criss-cross a landscape. The writer bows towards that old prejudice, while at the same time welcoming its consequences for creating England’s ‘peculiar’ configuration of country scenery – that smallness, comfort and ‘agreeable circumscription’. If smallness was to become a key property of the English countryside idyll, the picturesque needed a rescaling from its earlier affinities with the wild sublime. Ruskin’s concept of the picturesque as ‘parasitical sublimity’ met this need very deftly. Parasitical sublimity was a means of muting and miniaturizing the sublime while retaining its psychological impact, which could then be microcosmically reproduced on, for instance, uneven architecture, broken stone and moss stains. What was important about the sublime, so the argument went, was not necessarily its scale, but the affective nature of its formal properties. Thus the psychological, emotional impact of mountain sublimity could be kindled by focusing not necessarily on its sheer massiveness, but by abstracting its startling ruggedness and its abruptly changing variety of surface contour, texture and colour, and finding these replicated in miniature in those ‘little home scenes’ – as for instance in old cottages, or even smaller objects, as Ruskin explains: A broken stone has necessarily more various forms in it than a whole one; a bent roof has more various curves in it than a straight one; every excrescence or cleft involves some additional complexity of light and shade, and every stain of moss on eaves or wall adds to the delightfulness of colour. Hence in a completely picturesque object, as an old cottage or mill, there are introduced, by various circumstances not essential to it, but, on the whole, generally somewhat detrimental to it as cottage or mill, such elements of sublimity – complex light and shade, varied colour, undulatory form, and so on – as can 116

The Domestication of Picturesque England

generally be found only in noble natural objects, woods, rocks, or mountains. This sublimity, belonging in a parasitical manner to the building, renders it, in the usual sense of the word, ‘picturesque’.

39 Thomas Hand, Cottage and Hilly Landscape, 1797, oil on canvas.

The correspondence between mountain ruggedness and cottage scenery is almost diagrammatically demonstrated in Thomas Hand’s painting (illus. 39). The English picturesque absorbs some of the essential formal properties of the sublime and adapts them to its visual pleasure in the smaller-scale vernacular. ‘Picturesque’ also becomes the label for everything that represents in its rugged fabric and weathered surface a continuity with England’s past – something, for instance,

117

a sweet view that one could read in the architecture of old buildings whose irregular shapes showed that they had grown naturally over the centuries (like Emma’s Donwell Abbey). It was the reassuring guarantee of a living link to the distant past. The picturesque is also realized in the way older buildings adapted themselves in sympathy with the irregular natural environment (another form of continuity). The mid-Victorian architect William Young, who specialized in work on vernacular English buildings and who, like Ruskin, was hostile to much contemporary commercial architecture, developed an interesting argument about the emotional attractions of such buildings in the landscape, seeing them less as artificial constructions and more as living grafts on to the rootstock of Old England: The old village church, – coloured by the pencil of time from the sombre gray of its massy walls to the almost golden glow which the lapse of centuries has given to its tile-clad roofs; – the old manor-house, with its mullioned windows, long and low, and perhaps also the simple cottage, with its quaint dormers and gables . . . works that have been pre-eminently fixed (photographed as it were) on the mind, and we have them ever with us, pleasant pictures . . . they are simple, unpretending works, only they are picturesque: that is the element, the feeling which they possess which makes them pleasing objects in the landscape. They are picturesque in feature and in outline, and have a rhythm and a harmony so perfectly in unison with the surrounding scene, that makes them but another voice in nature’s chorus of hills, and groves, and wide-spreading plains: therefore it is we love them. Whereas the stuccoed house and the pretentious villa are out of tune and painfully discordant with nature’s works around them: therefore it is we hate them.

118

The Domestication of Picturesque England

The purging of the old picturesque I have seen a ragged shepherd boy . . . throw himself down in an attitude that Raphael would not have disdained to copy. Samuel Rogers, writing to William Gilpin

The old picturesque was seen by many early Victorians as a species of decaying Regency dandyism, and dandyism and dilettantism had to be purged. Dickens (influenced by Thomas Carlyle’s aversion to the Dandaical ‘body’) introduced the idea when in Bleak House (1852–3) he describes a gathering of the beau monde at Chesney Wold, the country seat of Sir Leicester Dedlock: ‘some ladies and gentlemen of the newest fashion, who have set up a dandyism [and] have agreed upon a little dandy talk about the vulgar . . . Who would make the vulgar very picturesque and faithful, by putting back the hands upon the clock of time and cancelling a few hundred years of history’ (ch. 12). Such a pictur­esque had to be ethically rehabilitated for Victorian taste, and landscape beauty or prettiness reconciled with moral imperatives. From the 1840s onwards the moral qualms about the old Pricean picturesque become louder. One example is Ruskin’s record of conflicting feelings during a stroll around the outskirts of Amiens one afternoon in 1858, when exploring some of the poor, derelict riverside dwellings by the Somme: ‘I could not help feeling how many suffering persons must pay for my picturesque subject and happy walk.’ Ruskin partially resolved this by proposing in Modern Painters (Part v, ch. 1) a new, ‘Turnerian’ picturesque, one that (from the examples in Turner’s art) understood and sympathized with the conditions of weathered decay and battered old age, rather than heartlessly exploited such conditions for their superficial, formalist attractions of roughness and variety of tint. 119

40 Samuel Palmer, ‘The Vintage’, illustration from Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (1846).

The Domestication of Picturesque England

Dickens, touring Italy in 1845, visited some of the slums of Naples, near the Porta Capuana, where tourists would come to view the young lazzaroni as exquisitely picturesque. ‘I am afraid the conventional idea of the picturesque is associated with such misery and degradation that a new picturesque will have to be established as the world goes onward,’ he wrote in a private letter home. He made his feelings very public in his Pictures from Italy the following year, with this heartfelt plea to his country: But, lovers and hunters of the picturesque, let us not keep too studiously out of view, the miserable depravity, degradation, and wretchedness, with which this gay Neapolitan life is inseparably associated! It is not well to find Saint Giles’s so repulsive, and the Porta Capuana so attractive. A pair of naked legs and a ragged red scarf, do not make all the difference between what is interesting and what is coarse and odious? Painting and poetising for ever, if you will, the beauties of this most beautiful and lovely spot of earth, let us, as our duty, try to associate a new picturesque with some faint recognition of man’s destiny and capabilities. Dickens closed this book with a more general wish for the world to move away from the picturesque of old Italy’s palaces, prisons and crumbling temples, towards a more benign, enlightened future. His sentiments, which in some ways recapitulate the long journey from the old classical inspirations for the picturesque to the new age, are framed in a delicate woodcut – a pastoral idyll by Samuel Palmer (illus. 40), one of the makers of the sweet English views for the Victorians, whose work we are shortly to consider.

121

Pa rt ii Painting and Writing English Scenery

four

‘Going-in-itiveness’: Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

I

41 Frank Newbould, Your Britain – fight for it now, 1942, poster with a view over the South Downs.

n the middle of one of the most harrowing wars in human history, a poster view of a quiet southern English landscape was published and widely propagated (illus. 41). The year was 1942. The relationship between the poster’s words and imagery was paradoxical: the undulating, sparsely populated countryside emanated tranquillity, while the superimposed text was a call to arms. Just like the First World War poster featured near the beginning of this book, in which a peaceful cottage landscape is captioned ‘Isn’t this worth fighting for? enlist now,’ the emotional jarring between scene and text was designed to galvanize wartime recruitment in order to save the precious country. In this poster the country, Britain, is most eloquently figured by its South Country landscape, designed to distil the nation’s character into a scene of Sussex pastoral. In Part i I traced some of the ways in which the changing ideas of the picturesque in England helped to introduce a range of hitherto largely neglected, vernacular scenery for artists and writers to bring into greater prominence. That changing picturesque was responding to various new pressures in English cultural, economic and political life (including war) during the late eighteenth century and the Regency. In this part of the book I will explore the work of three Victorian makers of English scenery: Samuel 125

a sweet view Palmer, Myles Birket Foster and Richard Jefferies. Each was fully conscious of his self-imposed task of mediating England’s countryside to a people whose lives were drawing them further and further away from that world. In the first part of this chapter we look at that most traditional of literary and artistic genres for evoking the sweet view of rural life and scenery for an urban audience: the English pastoral. This provides the context for considering Palmer’s extraordinary body of work, poised as he was between naturalist landscape painter and visionary portraitist of rural England. How did he adapt pastoral’s inherited traditions and respond to Victorian longings for an idyllic rural retreat? Let us first briefly return to that war poster of 1942, itself an extension of the ancient pastoral theme.

The shepherd in the landscape The poster’s artist, Frank Newbould, has amalgamated a number of iconic English landscape features. We are invited to accompany the shepherd and his flock into their landscape, where the recessional planes lap diagonally across each other towards the horizon’s slip of sea, giving us in succession pasture, shelving woodland, bright arable fields and uncultivated downland. Newbould juxta­ poses snug shelter in the embowered human dwelling, and liberating exposure in the grand rolling fields and downs; into the valley he tucks the ‘dells, and nooks, and corners’ cherished by Palmer, and, up by the clifftops, the freshness of vast open spaces on the edge of England. Newbould’s scene is identified in small print as ‘The South Downs’. He based the middle distance and background on an actual Sussex landscape on the South Downs, near Birling Farm (down in the dell) and the Belle Tout Lighthouse east of the Seven Sisters. However, the diagonal foreground field with the shepherd 126

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

and his dog is based on a near-contemporary Times photograph of a scene elsewhere, possibly near Lewes (illus. 42). The splicing together of the two different Sussex landscapes to constitute ‘your britain’ strengthens both theme and composition. Representing Britain as a whole with Sussex scenery would not have seemed odd at that time, nor at the end of the nineteenth century. The county was by then familiar as part of the South Country, the name given to the group of counties south of the Thames, spreading from Kent across to Dorset. The South Country is the title of Edward Thomas’s book of 1909, about the life of this region’s countryside. These counties had also provided settings for Thomas’s book The Heart of England (1906), which sought to assimilate the contemporary English countryside with a Golden Age, in leisurely and highly evocative prose. The poster’s assimilation of the Times image with a South Downs landscape aims to do much the same, in graphic form. Newbould’s borrowed foreground supplies the conventional pastoral theme: the shepherd out with his flock. The composition

42 Anonymous, A Shepherd on the Downs, photographic lantern slide published by The Times, 1930s.

127

a sweet view as a whole conveys the sense of a timeless rural world, which is also specifically ‘our’ countryside, now; and the blend is set in sharp relief from catastrophic convulsions elsewhere. It is designed to have the same kind of resonance as Thomas Hardy’s poem written in the middle of the First World War, ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”’: Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk . . . War’s annals will cloud into night Ere their story die.

Life survives at its lowest ebb in these ancient rhythms of working the land, pasturing sheep and cattle, the processes that keep us going. In such visions, deepest England, or Old England, seems unperturbed by seismic violence in the rest of the world. The ‘slow silent walk’ of Hardy’s ploughman is echoed visually in Newbould’s shepherd trudging up the hillside. This sense of timeless, unchanging tranquillity as an antidote to life in the busy public world of city and court, let alone war, had always been the solace of pastoral. For Palmer the founding text of the pastoral tradition was Virgil’s Eclogues, and the question he addressed for much of his career was how to acclimatize that pure Virgilian pastoral tradition to the cultural world of Victorian England. It presented much the same challenge of adaptation of the classical masters as that faced by early English landscape painters, as we saw in Chapter One. One such challenge was how, literally, to acclimatize classical pastoral. This had perplexed English writers for well over a century before Palmer. ‘What is proper in Arcadia, or even in Italy, might be very absurd in a colder Country,’ remarked Thomas 128

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

Tickell in his 1713 essay on pastoral poetry. Tickell had in mind, among other publications, Alexander Pope’s Pastorals (1709), in which Sicilian Muses on the banks of the Thames are invoked to tell the stories of Windsor shepherds with classical names who seek shelter from the improbably torrid noonday heat. (That ‘sweet view’ in Emma was sweetened by being enjoyed under a sun ‘bright, without being oppressive’.) The literary critic Joseph Warton, in the 1750s, lost patience with repetitive English versions of classical pastoral cliches: ‘Complaints of immoderate heat, and wishes to be conveyed to cooling caverns, when uttered by the inhabitants of Greece, have a decorum and consistency, which they totally lose in the character of a British shepherd.’ Near the end of the century, during the period when, as we have seen, the picturesque was engaging English nationalism, there is little tolerance left for sustaining the Virgilian conventions with their hybrid Anglo-Italian settings, fierce temperatures, classical shepherds’ names and so on. George Crabbe’s lines from The Village (1783) make this clear: Fled are those times, when, in harmonious strains, The rustic poet praised his native plains; No shepherds now, in smooth alternate verse, Their country’s beauty or their nymphs’ rehearse; Yet still for these we frame the tender strain, Still in our lays fond Corydons complain, ... Must sleepy bards the flattering dream prolong, Mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song? From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray, Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?

William Wordsworth much admired Crabbe, sympathized with his impatience at the tenacity of classical pastoral, and made 129

a sweet view the case, in The Prelude, for replacing the Arcadian swains or Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden shepherds with the modern Cumberland shepherd folk among whom he had grown up. For Wordsworth the shepherd was a figure from everyday life in whom working experiences in exacting mountain country in a northern climate had bred a natural stoical nobility (illus. 43). It followed from this that access to the pastoral idyll, or something approximating to it, no longer needed to entail imaginary excursions to Arcadia. It could be a journey made by tourists within their own country. They could travel from London or Birmingham to the downland pastures of the painters, to Wordsworth’s Cumberland fells or Constable’s Dedham Vale or Palmer’s Shoreham valley.

43 Henry William Banks Davis, The Old Shepherd, 1860s, oil over pencil on canvas.

130

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

These places drew one to the edges of the modern world. Mediated by the nature writers and the poets and painters, they offered to bring that ‘genuine – pastoral – feel of landscape . . . very rare and difficult of attainment’ (in Constable’s words) into nineteenthcentury England. In such locations the present seemed to fuse with the past, as was intended in Newbould’s poster, where the veteran shepherd in his remote rural setting represented paradoxically both a fading way of life (Old England) and (for modern England) a symbol of endurance, of continuity. By the middle and later nineteenth century, when Palmer was trying to sell his visionary valley scenes and persuade his countrymen of the therapeutic value of Virgil’s poetry, caustic sentiments about classical or Renaissance pastoral conventions had intensified. John Ruskin, lecturing in 1853 on Turner and his work, glanced aside sardonically at traditional pastoral, ‘poetry written in praise of the country, by men who lived in coffee-houses and on the Mall’. This was echoed by Palmer in his combative essay ‘Some Observations on the Country and on Rural Poetry’ (1883), in which he disparages the eighteenth-century ‘Strephons and Chloes of the coffee-house poets’ (illus. 44). Pastoral was, according to Ruskin, ‘essentially the poetry of the cockney’, bred in the city and for the city, mixing stale imagery and diction with ‘a few more distinct ideas about haymaking and curds and cream, acquired in the neighbourhood of Richmond Bridge’.The coming of photography helped to empty pictorial pastoral of its traditional classical ornaments, just as it encouraged naturalism in portraying landscape scenery. The end was nigh for ‘brown trees or gingerbread rocks . . . lazily culled out and dully copied . . . full of nymphs and satyrs that we do not own’, wrote the Athenaeum’s reviewer of a new photography exhibition in 1856: ‘From this epoch ought to date a new order of landscape.’ The downland shepherd imaged in Newbould’s poster and in John William Inchbold’s mid-Victorian A Shepherd on the Downs 131

a sweet view

44 Peltro William Tomkins, after William Hamilton, The Evening, c. 1789, stipple engraving.

(illus. 45) stood for an England and an Englishness that typified patient tenacity and a parental devotion to his flock. This man was stoical and yet sensitive; his livelihood relied both on his own tender and expert care and on his withstanding nature’s volatile moods. Thomas Hardy’s character Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) proved a popular type of this shepherding stock. W. H. Hudson, a naturalist who spent time among shepherding people, looked back over the later decades of the nineteenth century and saw in the downland shepherd 132

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

an apparently inbuilt or downs-acquired immunity to English modernity’s affliction – that ‘modern curse or virus of restlessness and dissatisfaction’, as he put it: I have, first and last, conversed with a great many shepherds, from the lad whose shepherding has just begun, to the patriarch who has held a crook, and ‘twitched his mantle blue,’ in the old Corydon way, on these hills for upwards of sixty years, and in this respect have found them all very much of one mind. It is as if living alone with nature on these heights, breathing this pure atmosphere, the contagion had not reached them, or else that their blood was proof against such a malady. This modern malady is the same as that mentioned in Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ (1853): ‘this strange disease of modern life . . . its sick hurry . . . divided aims . . . heads o’ertaxed’. The ‘disease of modern life’ is one of the prime shapers of the Victorian countryside idyll. Largely bred by the expansion of towns and cities, the ‘malady’ became linked with more specific

45 John William Inchbold, A Shepherd on the Downs, c. 1850s, graphite, watercolour and gouache on paper.

133

a sweet view late Victorian anxieties about the degeneration of the English stock. ‘Here in this nineteenth century of civilised effeminacy may be seen some relic of what men were in the old feudal days when they dwelt practically in the woods’: so wrote Richard Jefferies as he introduced the figure of the veteran gamekeeper, ‘every inch a man [in whom] freedom and constant contact with nature’ had maintained the ancient vigour of the English stock. Certain images in the later nineteenth century vividly sharpened this sense of a growing incompatibility between city and countryside. Gustave Doré’s drawing of London’s Ludgate Hill in the 1870s (illus. 46) shows a traffic jam at the bottom of Fleet Street. The roads and pavements are hideously congested, producing an image of London as the incubator of that ‘sick hurry . . . divided aims . . . heads o’ertaxed’. Ironically, the jam has been caused by a flock of sheep, presumably driven in from the country and on their way to Smithfield meat market. The poor sheep bloom as a radiant white mass in the sooty darkness of London. The scene might be captioned ‘Pastoral Come to the City’. These ancient symbols of rural tranquillity are stuck there, immobilizing London as they huddle below the smokily triumphant emblem of the new age, the railway. Pastoral at the verge of modern England is imagined again in Cecil Gordon Lawson’s eerie nocturne Strayed – A Moonlight Pastoral (1878; illus. 47). ‘Strayed’ refers to the lone lamb on the edge of the promontory, head raised as it suddenly confronts the antithesis of pastoral. As The Times remarked when reviewing the painting, ‘the blasted trees and the distant pit-chimneys tell of one of those regions of England in which 134

46 Gustave Doré, ‘Ludgate Hill – A Block in the Street’, engraving from Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (1872).

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral 47 Cecil Gordon Lawson, Strayed – A Moonlight Pastoral, 1878, oil on canvas.

Mammon has turned Nature out of doors.’ This juxtaposition makes the market connection unavoidable: the lamb strays to the furthest edge of its traditional rural domain and sees its eventual destination – a destination less brutally obvious than that confronting Doré’s flock in Fleet Street, but disconcerting enough to undermine any pastoral lyricism. The bare trees framing the lamb ironically resemble the outline of a lyre. Samuel Palmer knew the probable reception of his attempt to revive pastoral for the Victorian ‘sharp man of the world’, as he called him, the sort of man who would despise ‘wax-jointed pipes and poetic sheep which never come to mutton’ (unlike the probable destination of Lawson’s poor moonlit lamb). A version 135

a sweet view

of pastoral much more likely to be successful was the framing of a dream that conjured a world remote from the city, deep in English countryside, where the cosy rural homestead, family, shelter and nourishment all beckon the weary labourer in after a day in the open. That imagery might also commercially beckon the worldly Victorian man, with his growing sentimental attachment to domesticity; home and homecoming had a potent appeal for the Victorians, especially the idea of homecoming to a country cottage. The spread of Empire, entailing for many a working life in distant parts of the world, and the intensification at home of Victorian domestic ideology heightened the emotional pull of images of homecoming. Such images, in a secluded pastoral world, were Palmer’s forte – witness his etchings Christmas, or Folding the Last Sheep (illus. 48), and The Herdsman’s Cottage (illus. 49), both from 1850. The pastoral nocturne Christmas blends cold moonlight and warm cottage firelight, enfolding shepherd, children and sheep, while in the other etching the setting sun bathes the homeward-bound 136

48 Samuel Palmer, Christmas (Folding the Last Sheep), 1850, etching. 49 Samuel Palmer, The Herdsman’s Cottage, 1850, etching.

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

50 Joseph Farquharson, The Shortening Winter’s Day Is Near a Close, 1903, oil on canvas.

herdsman in an apocalyptic glow. These captivating images idealized home comfort and a benign natural world in terms that went to the heart of Victorian characterizations of the English rural scene. The pastoral homecoming idyll lingered into the next century, a circumstance on which the Scottish painter Joseph Farquharson capitalized. His painting The Shortening Winter’s Day Is Near a Close (illus. 50; also known as Beneath the Snowencumbered Branches) was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1903. Nearly every year for a quarter of a century Farquharson exhibited his rural snow scenes at the Academy. The demand for his particular landscapes was such that he executed several copies of this Winter’s Day (one sold at auction just a few years ago for nearly £160,000, and many people today will be familiar with it as a Christmas card subject).

137

a sweet view Farquharson’s scene is both inviting and forbidding. The radiating shadows of the trees on the roseate snow and the converging lines of the sheep draw the viewer towards the foddering farmhand. Man and animals go about their business stoically in the freezing landscape, which the artist has converted into a glowing image of homecoming, the contrary to Inchbold’s shepherd and flock setting out for the pastures (see illus. 45) and indeed to Newbould’s poster. An intense chill emanates from the landscape. It looks like a moment’s pause as the day fades and food and shelter beckon. As a Christmas card, designed for the mantel­ piece above a bright fire, its frosty winter aura would reinforce the comfort of the warm home scene. The scene, in fact, was carefully contrived by the artist. Farquharson commissioned model sheep from a sculptor and then arranged them for the painting. The farmhand had to stand for quite some time in the snow while the artist, from within his purpose-built, heated caravan, set about painting the scene through his window. John Everett Millais had similar difficulties finding live models for the sheep in the background of his Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50). In the absence of grazing flocks anywhere near his Bloomsbury studio, he had to buy sheep’s heads with the wool on from the neighbouring butcher’s shop. In the painting they still look much like stacked sheep’s heads in a shop window, and give another meaning, perhaps, to Palmer’s remarks about ‘poetic sheep which never come to mutton’.

The Virgilian muse and the railway whistle Given the Victorian attraction to various forms of revivalism (Gothic, Pre-Raphaelite and so on), Palmer might reasonably have thought it a culturally propitious time to reintroduce Virgil’s pastoral idiom, to counteract the rise of Victorian Philistinism. Writing to a friend in 1862, he remarked: ‘Classical subjects are 138

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

51 John and Charles Watkins, Samuel Palmer, c. 1864, albumen silver print.

peculiarly fit to be painted just now, as a protest against the degraded materialism which is destroying art.’ He committed himself earnestly to this prescription in his English Version of the Eclogues of Virgil, which he began to plan in the 1850s. As a token of his passionate engagement with it, when he was invited to sit for his portrait in 1864 he chose to be taken holding a half-open copy of the Eclogues on his lap (illus. 51). Palmer felt that some kind of antique pastoral ‘essence’ was necessary to the spiritual and moral health of his fellow Englishman, who, in his opinion, had become materialist and utilitarian: ‘rural scenes and sympathies and their cognate verse afford . . . a wholesome moral counterpoise and complement’ to the world of politics and public life. He contended that the genre should be developed so as to become ‘the pleasure ground of those who live in cities’. It is these readers particularly who need the help of pastoral in repairing ‘the natural link which has been broken when man has been removed from the cultivation of his native earth, and sees little from the windows that can make vision desirable: it is then that verse presents to fancy what is lost to sight.’ Pastoral in both poetry and painted landscapes offered to restore to the jaded imagination what was disappearing from the lived experience of most English people in the later nineteenth century. To that end it fashioned a substitute countryside, so that ‘when all the foulnesses without [in the city] are frozen down into a black fog, [the city reader] may call for lights, refresh the fire, and have tolerable weather with the poets.’ This is the function of the ‘sweet view’ of English countryside for most Victorians. 139

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

Inchbold’s painting A Study, in March (1855; illus. 52) performed this kind of pastoral service for the mid-Victorians – and we are now thinking of ‘pastoral’ in its other function, as spiritual ministry, regardless of any literal presence of sheep and their shepherd. His sweet view is largely free from both traditional pastoral conventions and sentimental rhetoric. The ewe and her lambs are there, certainly, glimpsed on the bright spring grass (fragile new life beside the crusted veteran sycamore), but they are tucked back in the middle distance. The group is diminished by comparison with the foreground’s attention to detailing those other harbingers of spring, the primroses and harebells on the right and the buds breaking on the spindly twigs on the left. The spring light, the crisp edges of the shadows and the sense of vivifying clear air are all evidenced as the painter renders this unassuming scene with startling precision of detail – almost as a botanical study. Inchbold gives us just an ordinary wooded slope of English countryside on the edge of fields, with another wooded rise in the distance. When exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1855, the painting was accompanied by a quotation from Wordsworth’s The Excursion: ‘When the primrose flower peeped forth to give an earnest of the spring’. That hardly inflects the painting in any significant way. However, the study was also entitled In Early Spring, and here the connection with Wordsworth is more interesting. There is an early poem of his entitled ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ (1798), in which, with strikingly simple language couched in light, airy quatrains, the poet greets spring (its ‘primrose tufts’ and ‘budding twigs’). But that greeting is muted by his accompanying sense of human loss:

52 John William Inchbold, A Study, in March (In Early Spring), 1855, oil on canvas.

To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man. 141

a sweet view The grief comes from the realization of his fellow humans’ loss of that link with nature. It is similar to Palmer’s lament of that ‘natural link which has been broken’. Repairing that link for the Victorians becomes Palmer’s mission in his career-long renovation of pastoral, a renovation that involved attuning the pastoral tradition to an English idiom or, more specifically – given Palmer’s Surrey and Kent locations – to a southern English idiom. His distinctive contribution to the genre lay not just in the way his paintings returned again and again to scenes of shepherds and their flocks, nor in his protracted campaign to reintroduce Virgil’s Eclogues, but in what he did with the landscapes inhabited by these familiar literary figures. Whether he worked with oils, or watercolour and gouache, or ink and gum arabic, he created strangely shaped and compressed landforms, very heavily textured; he manipulated scale; and he staged these scenes in near supernatural lighting. His primitive rural folk inhabit a world that has acquired, in visual terms, a formal primitivism; it is almost as though they and their landscapes have arrived on canvas or paper directly from ancient stained-glass windows (illus. 53). This formal naivety was quite deliberate. Palmer developed it during the years he spent living in Shoreham, Kent, in the Darent valley in the 1820s and early 1830s (illus. 54). He was part of a circle of artists known as the ‘Ancients’, who cultivated an archaic style. They were devotees of William Blake, whose own brand of pastoral, especially in Songs of Innocence and Experience and in his woodcuts for Virgil’s Eclogues, was a powerful 142

53 Samuel Palmer, Coming from Evening Church, 1830, tempera, chalk, gold, ink and graphite on gesso on paper.

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral 54 Samuel Palmer, Shoreham, Kent, 1831–2, graphite and grey wash on paper.

influence on Palmer’s landscapes. ‘Blake helped Palmer not only to see, but to see religiously,’ in Geoffrey Grigson’s words. Palmer in turn grounded Blake’s visionary world. He lifted the exquisite imagery of Blake’s Songs, with their partly classicized pastoral idylls, off the illuminated page and away from pure allegory, and transplanted them into the north Kent countryside. Harmonious gatherings of the generations in a country village, shepherds resting with their flocks – these motifs still carry some of Blake’s luminous visionary power and devotional ardour, but they also now live in a rich material world; the gardens are heavy with radiant apple blossom and the fields thick with corn-sheaves glimmering under a huge harvest moon (illus. 55, 130). This is where Palmer can realize his ‘little dells, and nooks, and corners of Para­dise’. He thus creates an English Arcadia where rural life and scenery fuse myth and historical topography, and this plays directly into the making of iconic English landscape. Palmer called this place his ‘valley of vision’, a phrase that marries the topographically specific Shoreham with the otherworldly, the material with the mystical. In so doing he both revitalized and naturalized the pastoral genre. 143

a sweet view ‘Ah where is the Virgilian muse? At the railway whistle she fled forever.’ So wrote Palmer many years after Shoreham to his brother-in-law William Linnell. Linnell was then in Italy, the land graced by Virgil and Claude, both of whom feature in this anguished letter about the state of modern England compared with the classical past that Palmer so idealized. Virgil’s Eclogues was just one of the texts that Palmer cherished over a lifetime of reading in an extraordinary range of literature that combined the British pastoral writers with mystical literature (Jakob Böhme, St Teresa’s autobiography). His first reading of John Fletcher’s pastoral drama The Faithful Shepherdess (1608/9), so he wrote, ‘agreeably disturbed my male lethargy’, because he found there ‘all my dearest landscape longings embodied’. What were these ‘dearest landscape longings’? Fletcher’s play is set in Thessaly, and conjures up mythological deities as well as peasant characters. It also conjures up idyllic landscapes: ‘Here be all new delights, cool streams and wells,/ Arbours o’ergrown with woodbines,

55 Samuel Palmer, The Harvest Moon, c. 1833, oil on paper, laid on panel.

144

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

caves, and dells.’ The imagery of rural seclusion in the latter line would particularly have captivated Palmer with his love of densely foliaged nooks and dells, a landscape rich with delicious retreats. But, retreats from what? These rural refuges and the dream of a life that is simplified and spiritually cleansed (the Shoreham Ancients covenanted to honour ‘the Ideal – the Kingdom within’) are Palmer’s response to contemporary England. He responds to Victorian Philistinism and materialism (‘Facts and mutton are his universe’), to the foul city environment and its generation of moral confusion and pollution (to which ‘rural scenes and sympathies’ offer ‘a wholesome moral counterpoise’), and also to the contemporary social and economic disturbances to those ‘rural scenes and sympathies’. The last taxed his imagination, for Palmer’s England confronted him with tension between his rustic idyll and the stark reality of contemporary rural life and labour – such a familiar predicament for the picturesque. Whereas Virgil could freely accommodate within his Arcadian idylls his own reflections on contemporary political events, Palmer could not admit such matters into his pictorial pastorals. He insisted that the English countryside retained a healthy social order, albeit on the wane, and this belief blinkered his outlook. During the Shoreham period, while he was affirming ‘I love our fine British peasantry,’ he was vilifying those rural labourers driven to desperation and rick-burning. He believed those ‘incendiaries’ had been encouraged by the ‘Radical Reformers’ who were now bidding for power in the immediate post-Reform Act parliament of 1832 (according to his political pamphlet An Address to the Electors of West Kent in 1832). For Palmer, this radical clique threatened to oust ‘the old high tories’, whom he favoured ‘because I find they gave most liberty to the poor’. Palmer’s countryside was made into a version of Old England and its traditional social hierarchies in which the manor house and its village constituted ‘a little polity, in which rule and 145

a sweet view subordination might be only harsher names for guidance and loyalty’. This ancient structure and its assumed concomitant moral economy (those ‘feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations’ assumed by the Communist Manifesto of 1848 to have pre-existed the rise of the bourgeoisie) had been lost in the modern city and in the factories, where workers were ‘dwarfed within some one of the minute subdivisions of labour, ever putting heads upon pins, or slave in waiting to the machine which can do it more quickly’. Palmer became an enthusiastic admirer of Ruskin’s social criticism, especially Unto This Last (‘I wish I had time to learn it by heart,’ he wrote in the 1860s), and Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Society. Under their influence in his later life he adopted positions on political economy and social welfare inconsistent with his earlier virulent anti-Reform sentiments. Ironically, though, some of his richest and most distinctive work, drawing on the West Kent scenery of Shoreham, belonged to that earlier period of violent rural protests. Through such Tory-tinted viewfinders, Palmer’s idealized Kent countryside somewhat resembled Constable’s idealized rural Suffolk. Both carry echoes of Washington Irving’s England as filtered through the perspective of the Sketch-book’s Squire Bracebridge, as he laments the alterations to the nation’s class relations: ‘we have almost lost our simple true-hearted peasantry. They have broken asunder from the higher classes, and seem to think their interests are separate. They have become too knowing, and begin to read newspapers, listen to alehouse politicians, and talk of reform.’ Palmer’s remark about the railway whistle putting to flight the Virgilian muse came in a letter of January 1862. His revulsion in this period to the age’s ‘degraded materialism’ is particularly intense, like his nostalgia for a soft feudalism, and so he insists that this is just the time for reviving classical subjects (‘Hogs live in the Present; Poets in the Past’). It was in this decade, the 1860s, that the anxiety and disorien­tation caused by 146

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

the undermining of religious faith became particularly acute with the repercussions of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and the historical criticism of the Bible in Essays and Reviews (1860). This may well have contributed to Palmer’s despair at the materialism of the age. England in this condition therefore needed a rural haven that also offered some spiritual solace. This is the sweet view that Palmer fashioned for his country.

Blake, Linnell and the Dulwich sentiment Palmer’s most significant inspiration for a rehabilitated, spiritually therapeutic pastoral came not directly from Virgil’s texts but from William Blake’s 1821 illustrations for the Eclogues (or, more specifically, his illustrations for the eighteenth-century poet Ambrose Philips’s imitations of Virgilian pastoral; illus. 56, 57). Palmer first saw these exquisite small woodcuts two or three years after their publication, and a few months before he was actually introduced to Blake in the autumn of 1824. They were to have a powerful and enduring effect, and he called them ‘perhaps the most intense gems of bucolic sentiment in the whole range of art’. In many ways, their impact on him set the course for Palmer’s greatest work: I sat down with Mr Blake’s Thornton’s Virgil woodcuts before me, thinking to give their merits my feeble testimony. I happened first to think of their sentiment. They are visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise; models of the exquisitest pitch of intense poetry. I thought of their light and shade, and looking upon them I found no word to describe it. Intense depth, solemnity, and vivid brilliancy only coldly and partially describes them. There is in all such a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul, and gives complete and unreserved delight, unlike the gaudy daylight of this world. 147

a sweet view

There are several points of interest in this description of Palmer’s first intensive encounter with Blake’s woodcuts. What strikes him almost immediately is not any particularly Virgilian characteristic, nor the pastoral theme they are supposedly illustrating, but their sensuous qualities. They primed his own vision. When, a year or two after encountering them, he settled in the village of Shoreham, he saw the valley landscape as so many exquisite poetic compositions of ‘little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise’, capable of generating that ‘Intense depth, solemnity . . . mystic and dreamy glimmer’. He wrote to his fellowAncient George Richmond soon after he had arrived in Shoreham: ‘I have beheld as in the spirit, such nooks, caught in such glimpses of the perfumed and enchanted twilight – of natural midsummer, as well as, at some other times of day.’ That determined Palmer’s unique contribution to English pastoral. The visionary perception caught in a glimmering twilight could transfigure even some of the more prosaic landscapes – Dulwich, for instance: ‘Remember the Dulwich sentiment at very late twilight time with the rising dews (perhaps the tops of the hills quite clear) like a delicious dream.’ 148

56, 57 William Blake, ‘The Blighted Corn’ and ‘Sabrina’s Silvery Flood’, woodcuts to Robert John Thornton’s edition of The Pastorals of Virgil (1821), enlarged.

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

One of the faculties Palmer shared with Blake was the heightened sense of a visionary world cohabiting with the real world. Indeed, such experiences seem to have happened to both of them in the same place, Dulwich. When Blake was about ten years old he had his first vision. Sauntering along by Dulwich Hill, he looked up to see a tree filled with angels, ‘bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars’. Palmer reflected on Dulwich as potentially ‘the gate into the world of vision’; in order to achieve this potential, ‘one must try behind the hills to bring up a mystic glimmer like that which lights our dreams. And those same hills . . . should give us promise that the country beyond them is Paradise.’ This is presumably what he meant by ‘the Dulwich sentiment’ – the artist’s capacity so to intensify the poetic representation of a place, through lighting and other formal strategies, that the ordinary acquires an extraordinary spiritual lustre. For Palmer, Dulwich and Shoreham prompted that impulse to transfigure familiar English landscapes into visionary places, and by contagion perhaps to rehabilitate the jaded imagination of the city-dweller. In his hands, the sweet view has an almost supernatural lustrous intensity. To ‘make the ideal probable’ was 149

a sweet view the great mission. He succeeded, according to one former member of the Pre-Raphaelites, Frederic George Stephens, who became art editor of the Athenaeum: ‘without departure from truth at any point, this artist makes our earth look like Arcadia.’ Back to Dulwich: here, from his sketchbook of 1824, are Palmer’s fuller prescriptions for the transfiguration of ordinary English scenes (partly cited earlier): Note. That when you go to Dulwich it is not enough on coming home to make recollections in which shall be united the scattered parts about those sweet fields into a sentimental and Dulwich looking whole No But considering Dulwich as the gate into the world of vision one must try behind the hills to bring up a mystic glimmer like that which lights our dreams. And those same hills . . . should give us promise that the country beyond them is Paradise. Palmer’s sentences epitomize that duality so characteristic of his work. It is a sequence of rapid adjustments as he oscillates between the Dulwich countryside and biblical and mythological intimations. From the same sketchbook is this pastoral landscape with sheep, a milkmaid and harvesters on the left (illus. 58). In the centre, beyond the village church spire, hop fields stretch away towards the hills and the ‘mystic glimmer’ of a setting sun. Partially framing and mediating this prospect is a pensive reclining figure, perhaps dreaming the landscape into the kind of paradisal vision that Palmer prescribed in his Note. Her hand rests on a Bible, which carries the inscription, ‘The earth is full of Thy richness.’ This effectively captions the whole picture. It is as if John Bunyan’s allegorical landscapes lie just beyond the rambler’s next horizon. Palmer used the phrase ‘valley of vision’ several times in his letters and notebooks. It refers both to a real place on Earth 150

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

58 Samuel Palmer, ‘Landscape with Woman Reclining against a Tree’, c. 1824, ink drawing on paper from a sketchbook.

– Shoreham and the Darent valley – and to idealized landscapes of the imagination; his famous phrase creates the hybrid. ‘A picture has been said to be something between a thing and a thought,’ he wrote, picking up on one of Coleridge’s Table Talk observations (‘Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing’). Oscillating between these two – between the material world of nature and the poetic soul, between landscape and art, between thought and thing – sometimes Palmer’s pictures seem predominantly allegorical and visionary, and sometimes pure naturalism. This ambiguity goes to the heart of his mission: how to reconcile poetic vision with landscape naturalism and how to wrest pastoral into an English context; how to ‘make the ideal probable’; and how to illuminate the ordinary into the extraor­dinary. In all these endeavours, two mentors jostled for the possession of Palmer’s artistic soul: the naturalist painter John Linnell and the visionary illuminator William Blake. During the Shoreham period Palmer was under the sway of both; sometimes more attuned to one than

151

a sweet view 59 Samuel Palmer, Ancient Trees, Lullingstone Park, 1828, graphite on paper.

to the other. Thus, writing to Linnell in 1824, he boasted: ‘I have not entertain’d a single imaginative thought these six weeks, while I am drawing from Nature vision seems foolishness to me – the arms of an old rotten tree trunk more curious than the arms of Buonaroti’s [sic] Moses.’ But a few years later, in 1828, he was chafing under the limitations of Linnell’s naturalism when drawing trees. He made a number of local studies for Linnell, including some of the ancient oaks in Lullingstone Park (illus. 59) near Shoreham, Linnell having assured him that he could ‘get a thousand a year directly’ through studies of the Shoreham scenery: I have just been trying to draw a large [oak] in Lullingstone . . . the moss, and rifts, and barky furrows, and the mouldering grey, tho’ that adds majesty to the lord of forrests; mostly catch the eye before the grasp and grapple of the roots; the muscular belly and shoulders; the twisted sinews. A couple of months before this he had confided to Richmond: ‘Tho’ I am making studies for Mr Linnell, I will, God help me, 152

60 Samuel Palmer, A Cow Lodge with a Mossy Roof, c. 1828–9, watercolour, gouache, and pen and black ink on paper. 61 Samuel Palmer, Pear Tree in a Walled Garden, c. 1829, watercolour and tempera on paper.

a sweet view never be a naturalist by profession.’ In spite of these vows, he was producing – seemingly with some relish – highly sensuous depictions of the locality, both its natural beauties, such as the ancient gnarled trees, and some of the local buildings, mossy farm sheds and barns. This is the repertoire of English scenery that he was recording with documentary fidelity at the same time as generating his moonlit, mystical nooks and dells and hamlets. Each fed the other to produce a body of landscape work that made the English countryside a voluptuous dream of retreat. The extraordinary watercolour A Cow Lodge with a Mossy Roof (c. 1828–9, illus. 60) is sheer materialized gusto. The crusted moss must have caught Palmer’s eye as its richest feature (just as the same motif caught Richard Jefferies’s eye decades later: ‘Orange moss on old tiles on cattle-sheds and barns a beautiful colour; a picture’). Bulging from the roof thatch in a gouache impasto, heavily textured and haptically seductive, the moss becomes the most intensively worked passage in the painting. It erupts three-dimensionally from the picture surface in the same extravagant way as the voluptuous fruit-tree blossom from his paintings In a Shoreham Garden (c. 1830, see illus. 130) and Pear Tree in a Walled Garden (c. 1829; illus. 61). Palmer’s son recalled his father’s extravagant loading of paint, with ‘a brush two inches broad, filled from the thick masses of colour on the wooden palettes . . . large clots of easily-moved colour were a distinguishing peculiarity in his practice.’ Palmer’s chromatic exuberance is intoxicating in this period, and something he remembered long after the Shoreham period – for instance, this jotting in 1860: ‘rising moon, with raving-mad splendour of orange twilight-glow on landscape. I saw that at Shoreham.’ These dichotomies – Nature and Art, Reality and Vision, Linnell and Blake – preoccupied Palmer’s engagement with the English countryside during this time: ‘I can’t help seeing that the general characteristics of Nature’s beauty . . . are in some respects, 154

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

opposed to those of Imaginative Art.’ And so the struggle went on to reconcile the antagonists. He always knew that the better chance of making a living from his art was to paint portraits of English rural scenery. Half a century after the Shoreham period he ruefully reflected on ‘that genuine village where I mused away some of my best years, designing what nobody would care for, and contracting . . . a fastidious and unpopular taste.’

English scenery and ‘going-in-itiveness’ In some of Palmer’s Shoreham pastorals, figures from the spiritual world walk in Kentish countryside (that is partly how the Ancients saw themselves, for a while). A subtler hybridity, and one more immediately important for the crafting of characteristic English countryside, happened when he harmonized the representation of landscape forms with his narrative subject, so that the trees and hills, fields and churches eschew topographical realism, scale and accurate perspective in favour of a crafted antique naivety, and that ‘mystic and dreamy glimmer’ that he so enthused about in the landscapes of Blake’s woodcuts. This occurs in that strange series of six drawings known as the Oxford Sepias, made in 1825, the year before he moved to Shoreham. All six are scenes depicting landscapes at those times of day most likely to generate the mystic glimmer Palmer sought: early morning, late twilight, full moon. Early Morning can serve as an example (illus. 62). Palmer attached a quotation to this picture, four lines from John Lydgate’s medieval poem The Complaint of the Black Knight: I rose anone and thought I would be gone Into the wode, to hear the birdes sing, When that misty vapour was agone And cleare and faire was the morning.

155

a sweet view

The limpid early-morning light shows a world strangely compressed into a shallow perspective of woodland path, cornfields, cottages and distant hills. Quite clearly here, ‘we are not troubled with aerial perspective in the valley of vision,’ as Palmer once noted during his Shoreham period. Forms are rounded into cushiony shapes – the plump hare, the umbrella canopy of the big oak standing amid the billowing fields, the beehive cottage roofs echo­ing the natural swell of the landscape. That middle ground is like the benign surging of a sea. Palmer once described journey­ing through similar countryside and invoked similar terms: ‘Riding between the Surrey sand-banks, lapped and folded in by pastoral crofts and overhanging orchards’. Perhaps Early Morning also reflects his 156

62 Samuel Palmer, Early Morning, 1825, pen and dark brown ink with brush in sepia.

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

admiration of Claude’s voluptuously mounded foregrounds: ‘His knolls, so softly clad, are round and figurelike.’ Right in the centre and heart of this softly quilted countryside a small group of people sit at ease in a dell, presumably (following the narrative of Lydgate’s lines) listening to the song of the birds on the twig above them. The stiff, archaic style chimes with the period of the verse quotation. This would have been a deliberate strategy. In a notebook entry (most probably made the year before, in 1824), Palmer remarked that representations of nature should be ‘most simple of style . . . what would have pleased men in earlier ages, when poetry was at its acme, and yet men lived in a simple, pastoral way’. Early Morning is simple of style and yet very richly wrought. Everything is pushed forward towards the picture plane, defying perspective and proper distancing, as if to gorge the viewer with a table of still-life landscape delicacies. Emphatically inked outlines isolate each landscape form, and each delineated segment has its own discrete texture and tone; the effect is like that of marquetry’s complex inlay of differently grained woods. It has the mysterious, bewitching quality of a closed world, an exquisite distillation of English country scenery, demonstrating Palmer’s maxim that ‘bits of nature are generally much improved by being received into the soul.’ ‘My idea is poetic compression in antithesis to landscape diffuseness’: Palmer’s artistic creed applies particularly well to Early Morning, which concentrates into a small space a cornucopia of rich landscape forms. His creed is adapted to the particular character of southern English scenery that he so cherished. The concentration of copious variety into a narrow compass became the hallmark of English landscape, as we have already heard from William Gilpin and others. Rich and brilliant distances had anyway a limited appeal for Palmer. Writing home to his sister-in-law from Pompeii in 1838 he acknowledged that Italy had spectacular prospects – ‘cities and villages cresting the hills and precipices; and . . . 157

a sweet view heavenly sunshine and atmosphere’. At the same time, ‘High as is the gratification of exploring this beautiful country, those who do not feel disposed to cross the channel may comfort themselves by knowing that specimens of almost every class of beauty may be found in our island . . . In apparent richness I think Kent and Devonshire have the preference of everything I have seen.’ That sounds like an echo of all those patriotic championings of English landscape scenery that we heard from the picturesque tour writers of Gilpin’s day. Palmer longed to return home from Italy, and he hoped there would be no further occasion to leave England: ‘[I] should enjoy to sojourn some day with you in our beautiful vales, to hide ourselves from an impertinent world in tangled orchards; to go sitting on our thyme hills, and in our magic Northern twilight to hear the village clock ticking in his grey tower.’ That epitomizes Palmer’s English idyll. He is enchanted by the idea of being tucked away in tangled orchards (or in snug dells, like the group in Early Morning) as the twilight deepens and the silence swells, with only the sound of the church clock. Similar sentiments and imagery come in a letter a few months later (again from Italy) as he dreams of an English pastoral essence: ‘we shall together thread the garden’d labyrinths of Kent, and on the thymy downs, by twilight, listen to the distant shepherd’s pipe or village bells.’ In 1859 Palmer compiled a list entitled ‘What must I do to attain excellence?’ He was after certain ‘effects’, including ‘Moon­­light with firelight’, which he had captured beautifully in Christmas (see illus. 48); ‘Figures of antique grace and sentiment’; ‘Intense depth of shadow and colour . . . trees of intensest depth’; and – ‘infinite going-in-i-tiveness’. That strange coinage, ‘going-initiveness’ (which is how he normally constructs this word), brings to mind those beloved ‘little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise’ that he had identified more than thirty years before in Blake’s woodcuts. This becomes the pure spirit of English pastoral 158

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

for Palmer, his scene-setting for seclusion from ‘the impertinent world’. His pastoral is not necessarily a matter of herdsmen and flocks in the picture; it lies in the nature of the landscape configurations, in quiet recesses (‘one of the great arts of life is the manufacturing of this stillness,’ he wrote in 1836). He discerned this in a range of painters; for instance, in the scenes of Fra Angelico: ‘nooks and dells of Paradise, where emulation, and power, and learning and greatness, have become empty sounds.’ So, instead of inviting the eye to roam across vast distances in grand prospects, why not slow its movement, entice it into dim nooks and mysterious pools of deep shadow, and into stillness? Praising a woodland landscape drawing by his friend Richard Redgrave, Palmer remarked on its power of ‘attracting the eye into the recesses: there is part of a pond or mere seen under the trees. Surely without this poetic intricacy, landscape loses nine tenths of its charm.’ Intricacy, with variety, had been a cardinal property of the picturesque, as we may recall from Uvedale Price’s formulations (‘by its variety, its intricacy, its partial concealments, it [the picturesque] excites that active curiosity which gives play to the mind’). It is what Price admired in Gainsborough’s landscapes, ‘intricacies . . . varieties of form, tint, and light and shade; every deep recess’. Palmer inherits this and names it ‘going-initiveness’. Palmer dreamed of several fantasies of retreat and seclusion in an English country cottage submerged in a brimming cornfield and enclosed by elms, or tangled in a maze of woodland. He played with variations on this theme in his sketchbook of 1824, in both written and drawn jottings (illus. 63): A large field of corn would be very pretty with as it were islands peeping out of it – a clump of cottages completely inclosed and shaded by trees – the corn being high, no part of the little isles in this wavy sea of plenty would be seen till they were 159

a sweet view perhaps 5 or six feet from the ground – only a clump of elm trees rising distinctly from the midst would be pretty. There is something here of the English love of snug containment that we noted in the last chapter as an ingredient in the developing sweet view. This impulse to retreat into embosoming mystery – the act of ‘going-in-itiveness’ – is both a visual and an imaginary one. A landscape can invite the viewer to recede into physical retreats, the woodbine-clad arbours or cosy, tangled nooks of twilight gloom. A landscape can also lure the mind into a temporal recess, where forms and figures draw one back into a mellow, old English history, populated by ‘figures of antique grace’. Or it can invite retreat into an apparent timelessness with the unchanging figure of the rustic herdsman. Pastoral thus becomes the past. It images an idealized refuge from the present. In Palmer’s later life, Shoreham itself, or the memory of Shoreham, became that epitome of ‘going-in-itiveness’. That village resurfaced in Palmer’s mind near the end of his life. His large watercolour The Bellman (illus. 64) was completed in the year of his death, 1881, although he had worked on versions of it for some years. In concluding this chapter I want to dwell on

63 Samuel Palmer, ‘Cottage in a Cornfield’, c. 1824, pen and brown ink drawing from a sketchbook.

160

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

64 Samuel Palmer, The Bellman, 1881, watercolour and bodycolour on board.

this image (indeed, I’m tempted to dwell in it). The subject came from Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’. The poem’s speaker dismisses ‘vain, deluding joys’ and dreams instead of evocatively solemn settings in which to indulge his melancholy mood to the full, before, in ‘weary age’, he chooses where to retire. One such setting is a ‘still removed place’ – Where glowing Embers through the room Teach light to counterfeit a gloom, Far from all resort of mirth, Save the Cricket on the hearth, Or the Belmans drousie charm, To bless the dores from nightly harm

161

a sweet view The Bellman is a village scene, but the conventional pastoral (or bucolic) element is there, foregrounded in the presence of the slumbering cattle. They are not penned into a byre or railed off from the human domain, but sleep on a cushion of land bordered by a low mound of hedge. They could stroll down the village street as freely as any of the human inhabitants. This is a Peaceable Kingdom nestled into a fold of English downland. It is an English nook that has slipped into the past, in two senses: the village seems to belong to a pre-industrial age, when the bellman would make his rounds to tell the hours and reassure the villagers that ‘All’s well’; it is also a scene from Palmer’s personal history. ‘I am very glad you like my Bellman,’ he wrote to a friend who had seen an etching of the painting in 1879: ‘It is a breaking out of village-fever long after contact – a dream of that genuine village where I mused away some of my best years.’ Notwithstanding the distant line of crags, this is a memory of Shoreham, a dream idyll of that time half a century before when his village was seen as a natural organism. Humans and animals share the same rhythms of work and rest, and now families are gathered back in their homes, like the cattle, and preparing to retire. In formal terms this image seems a long way from the Blakean idiom of the Shoreham village scenes such as Coming from Evening Church (1830; illus. 53), or the earlier Oxford Sepias. The intense compression has gone (‘my idea is poetic compression’), and so has the stylization of forms. The sentiment is the same, but without the visionary intensity it relaxes more into sentimentality. The lighting bows to a greater realism than the mystic glow of the Shoreham landscapes. The Bellman’s sweet view is nonetheless captivating – at least to this viewer. The warmth of those last gleams of the sunset, reflected in a cottage window or two, blends with the twilight rising from below the horizon and the firelight or lamplight from the cottage door. No wonder Palmer was attracted to the ‘Penseroso’ lines about embers that ‘Teach light 162

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

to counterfeit a gloom’. His twilight has a curious richness. It is a kind of softly illuminated bloom on the darkness, rather than the experience of failing light: ‘Increasing gloom sometimes enforces the sentiment of exuberance by giving more play to the imagin­ ation.’ It is that ‘mystic and dreamy glimmer’ that Palmer had so loved in Blake’s pastoral woodcuts, so utterly ‘unlike the gaudy daylight of this world’. That ‘gaudy daylight’ is now leaving the Bellman’s village and stimulating the imagination to wander in those tempting nooks and corners. As the shadows thicken, the mystery heightens: ‘Here we enter seclusion without desolateness’, wrote Palmer; ‘where light enough remains to show the village sheltered in its wooded nest, and that the ground heaves well and is rich enough in pasture.’ ‘Seclusion . . . sheltered . . . nest’: this evocation of the Bellman’s ‘drousy charm’ produces an English village pastoral that, for Palmer, carried his primary effect, ‘an unutterable going-in-itiveness’. The domestic epitome of this pastoral idyll is tucked into a foreground nook, a detail that bears closer examination (illus. 65). Opposite the slumbering cattle, a man and woman sit together in their cottage porch, a little arbour wreathed with a climbing plant. ‘Arbours o’ergrown with woodbines’: this is the phrase, mentioned earlier, that came from one of Palmer’s favourite pastorals, Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, where he had found ‘all my dearest landscape longings embodied’. The scene of the cottage porch has echoes, too, of an even more primal retreat – humanity’s first home. In Milton’s Paradise Lost (Book ix), Adam and Eve discuss the tending of their Eden domain, including their own dwelling: ‘whether to wind/ The woodbine round this arbour, or direct/ The clasping ivy where to climb’. Palmer’s village home is an Eden on English earth. Firelight or warm lamplight casts a glow on the cottagers from within, while the fading sunset catches the cap and shoulders of the woman. Neither source of light disturbs the ‘mystic and 163

a sweet view 65 Detail of Samuel Palmer, The Bellman, 1881.

dreamy glimmer’, nor does the illumination allow full definition of the group (is there a little child with the woman?). This lack of definition enhances the idyll in several ways, and not simply by rendering it in soft focus. The painter’s handling of this passage is very particular. These figures emerge indistinctly from the dense tangle of brushstrokes; it might be more accurate to say that they are constituted by this method, woven into being by the scattered patches of colour and calligraphic strokes, just as their enveloping arbour is constituted by its architectural tangle of hooped supports, wreathing stems and foliage. The people are thus formally assimilated into their ‘nest’, as an analogue of their idealized merged relationship with the pastoral context. In Palmer’s ‘dream of that genuine village’ (a phrase that combines the ideal with the 164

Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral

real place, like the ‘valley of vision’), his nesting cottagers come as close as anything to imaging that lost link with nature, the restoring of which had been the painter’s pastoral mission among his Victorian city-dwellers. It was to city-dwellers that his idealized English pastoral ‘dream’ was first publicly revealed, when in 1879 Palmer etched the picture for publication by the Fine Art Society. The print was put on display at their London premises that autumn. Did it stir the souls of his metropolitan compatriots? Palmer wrote forlornly to a friend, ‘the poor Bellman is gazing out of the window at the shops in Bond Street.’

165

five

Myles Birket Foster and the Surrey Scene

The air is, all things considered, very good. It blows over the – ha – Surrey Hills. Blows over the Surrey Hills. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1857), Book ii, Chapter 19

T

66 ‘Artistic Haunts, Witley, Surrey’, from The Pictorial World: An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, 15 December 1887.

his accolade to the Surrey air comes from the decaying, deluded mind of Dickens’s Mr Dorrit, the long-term inmate of a London debtors’ prison. It is part of his routine patriarchal welcome to new prisoners as they reconcile themselves to a period of confinement even more intense than the foul-air confinement of the city itself. By the second half of the nineteenth century Surrey air had become proverbial for boosted health, just as its rural scenery was being promoted for its picturesque attractions. In early 1862 Samuel Palmer was in western Surrey, combing the famously salubrious area for a house for Anne Gilchrist, recent widow of Alexander Gilchrist, the biographer of William Blake. Fresh country air was becoming an imperative for the Victorians, and Palmer assured her that he also knew a great deal about the soil and climate of this part of Surrey. In letters to others he rhapsodized about that countryside’s mix of cultivation, wild heathery summits and woodland farms, and about ‘riding between the Surrey sand-banks, lapped and folded in by pastoral crofts and overhanging orchards’. Palmer’s son recalled 167

a sweet view that his father’s ‘ideal of scenery’ was ‘approached, perhaps, by some of the exquisite country on the western borders of Surrey’.

The Surrey Hills and the wild bank By the middle decades of the nineteenth century Surrey had become a popular haunt for artists and writers. ‘There are few English counties that can boast of more truly picturesque localities than Surrey,’ pronounced the Art Journal in 1865. Together with Kent, it generated more landscape paintings than any other county in England, according to the records of the Royal Academy exhibition catalogues, particularly in the 1860s and 1870s. It was countryside conveniently close to London, and thus especially attractive for artists in search of landscape subjects. William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais had come down to the Ewell area in the early 1850s reconnoitring settings for their paintings of, respectively, The Hireling Shepherd and Ophelia. Palmer settled at Redhill in the same period, so as to be near the family of his father-in-law, the painter John Linnell, at Reigate; by the early 1890s that Reigate-Redhill area had become known as ‘John Linnell’s Country’. In 1877 the popular nature writer Richard Jefferies moved with his family from Wiltshire to Surbiton, so as to be within reach both of his London publishers (and his reading market) and of the Surrey countryside from which he foraged the rich materials for his essays and books, such as Wild Life in a Southern County (1879) and Nature near London (1883). The village of Witley in southwestern Surrey, on a ridge of greensand and about 4 kilometres (2½ mi.) from the town of Godalming, was particularly remarkable for attracting a number of artists and writers – so much so that by the 1880s it had its own brand as an ‘Artistic Haunt’ (illus. 66). In the early 1860s Witley became the home of the painter Myles Birket Foster. In 1876 George Eliot and George Lewes came down from London, 168

Myles Birket Foster

looking for a place to live that had fresh air (to improve Lewes’s poor health) and from which the city could be reached fairly easily. The following year they bought their house in Witley, The Heights, a large mansion originally designed as the home for Sir Henry Cole, the moving force behind the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Poet Laureate, Tennyson, lived about 16 kilometres (10 mi.) away, just over the Sussex border, at Aldworth. He is mentioned in Eliot’s description of the area: Witley, near Godalming . . . a lovely bit of characteristic English scenery. In the foreground green fields, prettily timbered, undulate up to the high ground of Haslemere in front, with Blackdown (where Tennyson lives) on the left hand, and Hind Head on the right . . . A land of pine-woods and copses, village greens and heather-covered hills, with the most delicious old red or gray brick, timbered cottages nestling among

67 Helen Allingham, View over Sandhills, Surrey, late 19th century, watercolour.

169

a sweet view creeping roses; the sober-colored tiles of their roofs, covered with lichen, offering a perpetual harmony to the eye. In 1881 a prodigiously productive recorder of Surrey rural scenery, Helen Allingham, settled with her family in the tiny hamlet of Sandhills, barely 3 kilometres (2 mi.) south of Witley (illus. 67). She became acquainted with the garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, who lived about 6 kilometres (4 mi.) away at Munstead. Altogether, the area became home to a significant gathering of writers and landscape artists, all drawn to this ‘lovely bit of characteristic English scenery’. Foster and Allingham, near neighbours for several years, established the distinctive identity of a certain kind of homely English landscape for the late Victorians through their paintings of the Surrey countryside. They were among the most popular artists of their age, and they propagated a particular character of English scenery. What was that character? It was certainly not something that had the full approval of the foremost landscape connoisseur of the age, John Ruskin. Although he praised the rendering of the Surrey river scenery in Ophelia as ‘the loveliest English landscape’, he also wrote privately to Millais about his choice of setting: ‘Why the mischief should you not paint pure nature, and not that rascally wirefenced garden-rollednursery-maid’s paradise?’ Ruskin’s notion of ‘pure nature’ as a refuge from the over-tended ‘nursery-maid’s paradise’ is a familiar theme in his writings. He favoured a picturesque that leaned towards ‘pure nature’ and ancient architectural forms that had been allowed to age and weather and yet still functioned to serve the human community in the modern period. In Modern Painters Part v, in discussing the ‘Turnerian Picturesque’, where (as we saw earlier) he outlined his argument for a revised picturesque, he railed at ‘the swept proprieties and neatnesses of English modernism . . . the spirit of well-principled housemaids everywhere’. Ruskin’s outcry was another challenge to Emma’s ‘English 170

Myles Birket Foster

comfort’, and echoed Charlotte Brontë’s reading of Austen’s fictional world – ‘a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers . . . no open country & no fresh air – no blue hill – no bonny beck’. However, Surrey did also have heather-clad open country, hills and fresh air. Like Kent, the county had been little touched by the parliamentary enclosures. It was ‘Ancient Countryside’, the term adopted by the twentieth-century historian of the countryside Oliver Rackham. In southeastern England this Ancient Countryside comprised most of East Anglia, the Home Counties and across the south coast to Hampshire. In ‘Planned Countryside’, writes Rackham, ‘landscape, laid out hurriedly in a drawing-office at the enclosure of each parish, has a mass-produced quality of regular fields and straight roads.’ In Ancient Countryside, ‘fields sometimes bear traces of much earlier phases of planning, but in general they have the irregularity resulting from centuries of “doit-yourself” enclosure and piecemeal alteration.’ Thus Surrey had preserved its centuries-old irregular field boundaries and extensive commons, and heathland stretched for miles across the Surrey Hills (Eliot’s ‘heather-covered hills’). One social commentator observed in 1872 that ‘the western part of the county is a series of commons . . . This sort of land may, in fact, be said to be the characteristic feature of Surrey.’ In the 1790s the county had been about 20 per cent heath and 4 per cent woodland. Much of it was turning spontaneously into woodland over the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when it was beckoning Londoners to establish country homes. This was the landscape into which Eliot, Foster and Allingham settled. Let us look more closely at Eliot’s sketch of the Witley area. She describes it as undulating, with ‘prettily timbered’ fields, copses, village greens, heather-covered hills and old ‘timbered cottages nestling among creeping roses’; she might be describing a watercolour by Foster or Allingham. The picture drawn is of a 171

a sweet view pretty, domesticated landscape, a mix of rural and architectural motifs that live comfortably together, concentrated in that detail of the ‘sober-colored tiles . . . covered with lichen, offering a perpetual harmony to the eye’. In tone and colour, but more particularly in ecological terms, the artificial and the natural are blended in this vision. The artificial has become naturalized. That is the essence of the landscape motifs developed by Foster and continued in Allingham’s work. Witley was ‘a bosky-copsy country, very picturesque and English’, as the artist Charles Keene put it in 1865, having been lured down from London by his friend Foster to take up a subtenancy at nearby Tigbourne Cottage (illus. 68), which Foster himself had occupied with his family for a few years from 1860. Keene’s compound adjective ‘bosky-copsy’ is interesting. Surrey was not heavily forested, but had small patches of woodland with plenty of undergrowth. That scale, caught in Keene’s description, is an important feature in the characterizing of English scenery. ‘Bosky’ derives from the Latin boscus, which gave the Middle

68 Tigbourne Cottage, Witley, 1862, photograph from H. M. Cundall, Birket Foster R.W.S. (1906). Foster can be seen near the entrance, standing beside his niece, Miss Brown.

172

Myles Birket Foster 69 Myles Birket Foster, The Cottage, n.d., watercolour and bodycolour.

English bush and the French bouquet. The last originally meant a clump of trees, but became miniaturized into the floral bouquet. ‘Copsy’, likewise, from ‘copse’, denotes small stands of trees. The word comes from ‘coppice’, the ancient practice of cutting back trees to near ground level to stimulate growth, replacing a single thick trunk with sprays of slim vertical limbs – a ‘bouquet’, in effect. ‘Bosky-copsy’ is a precise and evocative compound to describe the character of this kind of English scenery. It also has an onomatopoeic force; the concentration of consonants and sibilants produces the sensuous auditory experience of the bushes, soft hedges and clusters of small trees that furnish the comfortable upholstery of Surrey scenery in which the cottages nestle (illus. 69). This region of south Surrey and north Sussex became ‘Birket Foster Country’ and then ‘Helen Allingham Country’. H. M. Cundall, one of Foster’s earliest biographers and an acquaintance of his, remarked in 1906 (seven years after Foster’s death): As may be seen by glancing through the titles of his exhib­ ited paintings, the neighbourhood around Witley had great 173

a sweet view

70 Distant view of ‘The Hill’, Witley, when first built, photograph from H. M. Cundall, Birket Foster R.W.S. (1906).

charm for Birket Foster, and drawings made on Hambledon Common and in the village of Chiddingfold, with their picturesque cottages roofed with thatch or red tiles, now fast disappearing, and their leafy lanes with happy children gathering wild-flowers, or the beautiful view from his own residence overlooking the Surrey Weald, with Hindhead and Blackdown in the distance and glimpses of the Brighton Downs beyond, are best appreciated by the public and it is by these paintings that he is best known. One of the picturesque half-timbered and mellow-tiled Witley houses that might have caught George Eliot’s eye in 1876 was the large hilltop residence of Foster (illus. 70). It stood proud in every sense, with its broad barge-boarded gables, and walls half-covered with trailing creepers and climbing roses, amid the pines and heather. It had a distinct patina of age, although it was only about fifteen years old when Eliot moved to the village. It was called The Hill. Foster had designed much of it himself and superintended its construction while living at Tigbourne Cottage, and the 174

Myles Birket Foster

building’s look of age was helped by his artistic eye and aesthetic prejudices. He bought as many weathered tiles as he could from the old cottages in the neighbourhood (many of them falling into decay) and had them used for his roof. These cottages had actually been giving way to a new population of wealthy out-of-towners for several decades. The older rural population declined significantly from the 1860s onwards, a development accelerated by the agricultural depression that set in in the 1870s. Some of Surrey’s labourers in this area earned less than ten shillings a week, and half the county’s population was illiterate. During his house-hunting expedition in 1862 Samuel Palmer had reported to Anne Gilchrist that land prices in the Guildford area had risen to £800 per acre. Unsurprisingly, therefore, over the last quarter of the century 40 per cent of farm labourers disappeared into other occupations, or emigrated. Village communities had been stagnating or decaying for some time before that. Shortly after the middle of the century a counter-movement set in. The railway from London had reached Witley by 1859. ‘In the older days, London might have been at a distance of two hundred miles,’ reflected Gertrude Jekyll in her memories of this part of Surrey: ‘Now one can never forget that it is at little more than an hour’s journey.’ This rural village idyll was now within convenient reach of Londoners for their weekends, and equally convenient as a place for commuters to buy or build homes. Marcus Huish, managing director of the Fine Arts Society and author of one of the earliest books on Allingham, The England of Helen Allingham (1903), knew the village well and commented on its social and architectural transformation over the last few decades of the nineteenth century, focusing on the typical ‘landlord’ who oversees the new developments for ‘doing up the old places’:

175

a sweet view they often supplant fine old work, most of it as firm as a rock, with poor materials and careless labour, and rub out a piece of old England, irrecoverable henceforth by all the genius in the world and all the money in the bank . . . no uneven tiled roofs, with moss and houseleek, must remain; no thatch on any pretence, nor ivy on the wall, nor vine along the eaves. ‘Old England’ again; Foster was one of those whose arrival in Witley contributed to the hastening of this process of rubbing out ‘a piece of old England’, while at the same capitalizing on its fading presence by painting the record of a dying way of life and its architectural scenery. The profits from his sentimental portraits of Old England joined the new money that was funding the supplanting of the ancient landscape scenery with a mix of new mansions and imitation old cottages (whose ‘home-made tiles and honest English oak’ were being replaced by Welsh slate and Swedish pine, cheaper and now more easily transported). Huish mentioned an exhibition in 1886, when Allingham was given her own show, ‘Surrey Cottages’, at the Fine Arts Society. Six of the cottage scenes had been painted in the year or so before the exhib­ ition. By the time the exhibition opened, not one of those cottages (near Hindhead) was any longer as she had depicted it, ‘having in that short time been “done up” by local builders at the bidding of Philistine owners’. What had appealed to Eliot as ‘a lovely bit of characteristic English scenery’ affected William Morris differently: ‘[it] looks more than most countrysides as if it were kept for the pleasure of the rich, as indeed it is.’ The general picture is summed up succinctly in Jose Harris’s social history of late Victorian Britain: ‘As rural England declined in productive importance, it was beginning to acquire a new role as the dormitory, nursery, refuge and recreation-ground of urban civilization.’ Foster’s engravers, the Dalziel brothers, during a visit to him in his grand Witley 176

Myles Birket Foster

71 Myles Birket Foster, The Hill, n.d., watercolour and bodycolour.

house, heard him say: ‘When I sit down in that [studio] chair after breakfast it means at least twenty guineas before I get up again.’ The local estate agents and landlords could hardly ask for better marketing of their land and properties than the landscapes produced by Foster and Allingham. Pastiche ‘old’ cottages and lucrative framed rural idylls were replacing, if not actively displacing, the last vestiges of anything like an authentic village community of rural workers and their cottage homes in this part of Surrey. There is a richly documented account of this later Victorian surge of interest in the ‘picturesque vernacular’, especially as it developed along the Thames, in Paul Readman’s Storied Ground (2018). Surrey was a prime focus for late Victorian ‘rurolatry’, to adopt the term used sardonically by George Bernard Shaw, a selfconfessed ‘rusophobe’. To his dismay Shaw once received an invitation from a friend to stay for a few days in the Surrey Hills. 177

a sweet view It rained constantly from the moment the London train deposited him at Farnham station (about 16 kilometres/10 mi. from Witley), and his comical account of the whole miserable excursion was designed to extinguish any rurolatrous enthusiasm among his readers. Delighted to be on the return train to London, he reflected: ‘From the village street into the railway station is a leap across five centuries from the brutalizing torpor of Nature’s tyranny over Man into the order and alertness of Man’s organised dominion over Nature.’ Devotees of the sweet view, however, were delighted to reverse that leap, escaping the city’s ‘organised dominion’ and finding refuge in a countryside where (supposedly) Man lived in blissful harmony with Nature. Foster’s substantial new home (illus. 71) was set in 8 hectares (20 acres) of Witley countryside. For the interior design he called in the firm of (William) Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. The rooms were rich in dark wood panelling, floral wallpaper and, above all, sumptuous stained-glass windows with designs by Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Outside the house and around two sides of it was a terrace with luxuriant, fairly formal flower beds and a low stone parapet. From that the garden fell away down the hillside in steeply sloping lawns and winding paths with ornamental conifers and more flowers. A tennis court was added later. The whole ensemble, managed by a staff of gardeners, was a model of horticultural order and control. One writer who visited the house in the 1880s was conducted on a tour of the rooms by Foster himself. The last room to be shown was the small studio, just off the entrance hall. It was crowded with portfolios of sketches. The key inspiration was to be seen through the window: a bank of wild flowers and tangled bracken and briar. The gardeners, assiduous in ordering and cultivating the rest of the grounds, were forbidden to touch this bank. Thus, framed by the window, was a perfect piece of 178

Myles Birket Foster

luxuriant, rough foreground, dense with wild vegetation, a small oasis of wilderness conserved within a groomed landscape. It is an echo of picturesque ‘negative gardening’. Uvedale Price would have sympathized with the gesture, as would Samuel Palmer, whose son recalled his father’s deliberate encouragement of weeds and overgrown grass in his back garden, designed for the benefit of his painting students (and the complaints of his neighbours). One of Palmer’s own sketches of dandelions and tufts of grass on his back lawn carries the scribbled valediction: ‘Farewell, soft clusters – the only pretty things about the premises – ye are to be mowed this evening, and to leave a scraped scalp of “respectability!”’ Foster’s wild bank expressed that anxiety to preserve the freedom of spontaneous natural growth as a contrast to rapid urban and suburban spread. Hundreds of miles of paved roads and railway lines were pushing their way through the countryside, and these new thoroughfares gradually became lined with housing, shops and station hotels. These in turn thickened into new estates that branched out into the old lanes and cottage hamlets, slowly eroding the sense of rural isolation. The jolt of witnessing these rapid developments, in regions where change had seemed very gradual and sometimes barely perceptible for generations until the early nineteenth century, is recorded in Ruskin’s description of a walk he took in 1880, from his house on Herne Hill down towards Norwood (then part of Surrey). He passed along Croxted Lane (illus. 72; now Croxted Road), and the accumulated details he observed give a vivid impression of the profound impact of such radical environmental change for the Victorians: In my young days [most likely referring to the 1820s and 1830s], Croxted Lane was a green byeroad traversable for some distance by carts; but rarely so traversed, and, for the most part, 179

a sweet view little else than a narrow strip of untilled field, separated by blackberry hedges from the better-cared-for meadows on each side of it: growing more weeds, therefore, than they, and perhaps in spring a primrose or two – white archangel – daisies plenty, and purple thistles in autumn. A slender rivulet . . . there loitered – through the long grass beneath the hedges . . . There, my mother and I used to gather the first buds of the hawthorn; and there, in after years, I used to walk in the summer shadows, as in a place wilder and sweeter than our garden, to think over any passage I wanted to make better than usual in Modern Painters. So, as aforesaid, on the first kindly day of this year, being thoughtful more than usual of those old times, I went to look again at the place. . . . no existing terms of language known to me are enough to describe the forms of filth, and modes of ruin, that varied themselves along the course of Croxted Lane. The fields on each side of it are now mostly dug up for building . . . Half a dozen handfuls of new cottages, with Doric doors, are dropped about here and there among the gashed ground: the lane itself, now entirely grassless, is a deep-rutted, heavy-hillocked cartroad, diverging gatelessly into various brickfields or pieces of waste; and bordered on each side by heaps of – Hades only knows what! – mixed dust of every unclean thing that can crumble in drought, and mildew of every unclean thing that can rot or rust in damp: ashes and rags, beer-bottles and old shoes, battered pans, smashed crockery, shreds of nameless clothes, door-sweepings, floor-sweepings, kitchen garbage, back-garden sewage, old iron, rotten timber jagged with outtorn nails, cigar-ends, pipe-bowls, cinders, bones, and ordure, indescribable: and, variously kneaded into, sticking to, or fluttering foully here and there over all these, remnants, broadcast, of every manner of newspaper, advertisement or big-lettered 180

Myles Birket Foster

bill, festering and flaunting out their last publicity in the pits of stinking dust and mortal slime. As that older world of green lanes, blackberry hedges, untilled field and loitering stream – those places ‘wilder and sweeter than our garden’ – faded, their idealized replicas and pretty memorializations in paint prospered. The distinctive forms of that disappearing world became miniaturized, as in dried wild-flower sprays standing under bell jars or pressed into album pages, side by side with prints of country landscapes by Foster. There is indeed a strange convergence of the natural and the artificial in this quest for the sweet view: the wild flowers, frail and desiccated, were flattened into images on a page while Foster’s representations of them and their settings meticulously reproduced the botanical reality. His own cherished wild bank was something to be preserved artificially – a still life, a painter’s lay figure of ‘nature’. Such places became modern conservation sites, where the sumptuous gardens for the new mansions could pre­­ serve small ‘natural’ areas of old woodland or rough ground, the

72 William Strudwick, Croxted Lane, West Dulwich, c. 1865, photograph.

181

a sweet view disappearing domains. These were the ancestors of the National Parks. The old Witley cottages, arrested in decay and losing their original labouring families, were redeveloped for weekending Londoners, in something of the same way that in Foster’s and Allingham’s pictures the local cottage scenes were being twodimensionally ‘done up’ as ornaments for the delectation of the modern consumer.

Broken foregrounds and the ‘leafy style’ Foster’s voluptuously tangled wild bank offered a study in foreground. Attention to foreground had become increasingly important in English landscape art since William Gilpin had begun to prescribe his picturesque priorities for landscape artists. He had insisted that ‘Foregrounds are essential to landscape: distances are not.’ Foster might have taken to heart Ruskin’s instructions in Elements of Drawing (1857): ‘In general all banks are beautiful things, and will reward work better than large landscapes.’ Ruskin continues: If you live in a lowland country, you must look for places where the ground is broken to river’s edges, with decayed posts, or roots of trees; or, if by great good luck there should be such a thing within your reach, for remnants of stone quays or steps, mossy mill-dams, etc. Nearly every other mile of road in chalk country will present beautiful bits of broken bank at its sides; better in form and colour than high chalk cliffs. In woods, one or two trunks, with the flowery ground below, are at once the richest and easiest kind of study. Lowland country was becoming the heart of the English rural idyll, largely thanks to Foster and Allingham, and their countryside was particularly rich in such foregrounds. They were delicious 182

Myles Birket Foster

compensation for the relative paucity of great prospect views in the landscape. The illustrated magazine Art, Pictorial and Industrial published photographs specifically to help the artist sketching from nature, and the first in this series (in 1870) was ‘a charming study for the foreground of a bit of woodland scenery’ (illus. 73). The pictorial treasures to be found in broken ground, crumbling banks and exposed tree roots match some of Foster’s favourite studies – what he called his ‘bits’. This repertoire of picturesque ‘bits’ was close to hand for him: just outside his studio window, of course, and also a little further afield in the lanes and copses of Witley. Attention to this medley of natural details had been instilled in him early on. When he was sixteen he was apprenticed to the wood engraver Ebenezer Landells (who had been a pupil of Thomas Bewick). Spend your summer months in the fields, Landells told the boy: ‘take your colours and copy every detail of the scene as carefully as possible, especially trees and foreground plants.’ Crumbling banks, wild flowers and ivied trees furnished

73 Foreground woodland scene, photograph from Art, Pictorial and Industrial, i/2 (August 1870).

183

a sweet view

a compendium of foreground ‘bits’ for his brush to work on in minute detail. Let us take one example, his beautiful watercolour Lane Scene at Hambledon (c. 1862; illus. 74). The scene was one local to Foster’s home, a partly sunken lane about a mile southeast of Witley. The cottages were almshouses; an elderly woman is visible in the doorway. A family of cottagers are resting by the steps to the almshouses, looking as if they have paused on their journey, perhaps to beg that pitcher of 184

74 Myles Birket Foster, Lane Scene at Hambledon, c. 1862, watercolour on paper.

Myles Birket Foster

water or milk beside the girl on the steps. The foreground lighting picks out the group brightly and leads the eye to the more remote and strongly framed lightwell down the lane. Foster was paid handsomely for the watercolour, 100 guineas. The lane itself was subsequently renamed One Hundred Guinea Lane; in a cruel irony so often associated with the picturesque, those almshouses were later demolished as unfit for habitation. Foster’s sweet lane scene with its wayside cottage was as usual meticulously crafted. ‘Highly elaborated’ was the comment of the Art Journal when reviewing it at the exhibition of the Society of Painters in Water-colours that year: ‘composed after the manner of Vignettes . . . Each point . . . is thoughtfully studied and carefully balanced, even to the placing of a group of fowls feeding. Each light and every shadow falls precisely in its fitting position, and the strokes of the facile pencil, infinite in multitude, are playful as a wind-dancing leaf.’ Let us focus on the foreground. The bank on the left of the picture is scrupulously worked in characteristic fashion as the reviewer mentions (perhaps even aided by Foster’s consulting his own wild bank during his studio time on the picture). This is a part of the roadside where the bank hasn’t been reinforced by the embedded stone walling that can be seen a little further along. Contrasts of tone and light bring vitality to this passage. The bank falls down to the road in gentle undulations, upholstered by cushioned clumps of grass, the sprays highlighted here and there with thicker body colour. Twigs, brambles and coarser stalks of old grass criss-cross this groundwork of ochreous sandy earth and springy blue-green new grass. Periwinkle trailers and other wild flowers add tiny flecks of bright colour. It is distinctly inviting, and as if to reinforce this sense of an unassuming English locus amoenus, the travelling family has chosen to settle down by it. The softly rounded and flowing contours of mother and child are easily accommodated in the rhythms of the bank’s slopes and grassy 185

a sweet view protuberances. It is ‘English comfort’; the countryside is portrayed as physically hospitable for the poor travelling family. The bank on the opposite side is not so densely detailed. Foster has made it part of a holloway, an ancient homely track accommodating local traffic, such as the family we see by the almshouses. Its steep, cliff-like drop has eroded it of vegetation. The flayed surface is vibrant in colour and glows warmly, intensified by the deep greens and greeny blues of the thick overhang of bushes and trailers. Brown, orange, saffron, touches of milky amethyst, all suffuse the old bank where the earth has been broken open to reveal the rich staining of different soils. Brushstrokes build minute hatching or stippling. The brush must have been dipped in a slightly different colour shade every single time Foster brought it back and forth between palette and paper. Broken surfaces close to the foreground exactly suited Foster’s technique. Tennyson once asked him, when they were out walking together in the Surrey Hills, ‘Why do you painters always prefer a tumble-down cottage to others?’ Foster replied, ‘Because no one likes an unbroken line.’ The preference for accumulated and varied foreground detail stayed with him throughout his life. When touring the grand scenery of Europe – the Rhine, the Italian lakes, the Swiss mountains – he would hunt out ‘bits’ to sketch, as Cundall remarked: ‘The word “bits” is particularly applicable in the case of Birket Foster, for he almost invariably preferred to make a drawing of some detail rather than a broad landscape.’ Foster apparently used to say that ‘the mountain scenery of Switzerland was too panoramic and had no attractions for him.’ English scenery for the sweet view is often a mosaic of beautiful ‘bits’. Foster’s picturesque emerges not just in his choice of motifs, conventionally picturesque as they were (cottages, hedgerows and so on), and not just in his relish for foreground; it is fundamental to his treatment of these motifs. ‘Roughness’, as Gilpin 186

Myles Birket Foster

had written, ‘forms the most essential point of difference between the beautiful, and the picturesque.’ Foster liked broken lines and surfaces, subtly variegated, so that his meticulous patchwork of minute single brushstrokes could generate dense texture to match the rich natural vegetation clothing his Surrey scenes. His intricate stippling also amounts to an expressionist rendering of this passion for the endless play of natural detail in all its diversity. That this was something to do with the specific nature of English landscape scenery, particularly the landscape of the Surrey Hills – some quality peculiar to its morphology – is suggested by his biographer Jan Reynolds: ‘The Surrey countryside was always to be a source of spiritual uplift and a constant joy to the eye of Birket Foster, but he could not convey this by means of conventional water-colour washes, with the result that his early works were almost certain of opposition from exponents of the natural style.’ Reynolds describes Foster’s work as having a ‘delicate leafy style’, a description that is evocative and peculiarly suited to Foster’s work. Earlier, we came across the comment that ‘the strokes of [his] facile pencil, infinite in multitude, are playful as a wind-dancing leaf.’ Foster’s brush was surely rather more laboriously applied than ‘playful’, but the emphasis on the delicacy of touch is right, as is the point about the infinite multitude of brushstrokes that make up a single picture – or even a single detail within that picture. That much is easy to see in the detail of the left-hand bank in Lane Scene. ‘Leafy’ captures the combination of this lightness of touch with the sensuous density of detailing in his leaves of grass or trees. In reviewing an exhibition at the Old Watercolour Society in 1860, The Spectator marvelled at Foster’s fastidious detailing: ‘every thorn on the briars, frond on the ferns, and feather on the ducks, in the foreground, is to be painted. The trees are touched leaf for leaf, almost, or at least the leaves are as visible as in nature, if not a trifle more so.’ What 187

a sweet view Foster achieved in his landscapes, according to this reviewer, was ‘a sort of micro-mosaic done with the finest point of the brush’. Leaf-for-leaf and blade-for-blade representation may be one reason for seeing Foster’s style as ‘leafy’. But leafiness is also a quality of sensuousness in his landscapes. His technique creates the illusion of extraordinary and seductive surface texture; the minutely painted moss is there to be stroked, the thick, cool leaf clusters invite fingers to thread through them. The haptic nature of his scenes is helped also by Foster’s use of body colour added to watercolour, sometimes achieving effects of impasto more usually associated with oil painting. Thus the fleeciness of his clouds or the rough mesh of his thatch could almost be physically felt. This is a striking quality in a watercolourist. Marcus Huish, in his 1890 appraisal of Foster in the Art Journal, made the point that Foster’s early training had been in drawing for wood engraving, and that this strongly influenced his later practice as a watercolourist. He was more or less selftaught as a painter in this medium, and that is perhaps just as well, since it enabled him to develop an idiosyncratic style. Selftaught he may have been, but with an informed enthusiasm for particular practitioners. He owned a number of Turner’s atmospheric watercolours of European landscapes, as well as nearly a dozen of the meticulously detailed and jewel-like studies of nature by William Henry ‘Bird’s Nest’ Hunt. Watercolour traditionally favoured broad washes, exploiting the luminous qualities of the paper seen through the paint. But Foster’s art was very different; he used very little water in his watercolours, so that it was almost a matter of drawing with the brush. A similar point is made by Blackwood’s Magazine: ‘The execution is . . . almost the work of the graver; the usual sweep of the full and flowing water-colour brush is here exchanged for the lines and dots of the pointed pencil.’ In technical terms Foster is indeed an anomaly. He composed his watercolours almost like an engraver, and at the same 188

Myles Birket Foster

time he often produced effects with his watercolour pigments more like those of a painter in oils. His paintings lure the viewer in to linger and explore the dense detail of his scenes, and they slow the pace for the haptic eye to absorb the different surfaces. Foster’s sedative landscapes were extraordinarily popular. He was acclaimed as ‘an admirable assuager of the animosities’, a tonic for a restless population. In 1877 the Art Journal reflected on how he ‘loves to withdraw us from the turmoil, and strife, and envy, and wickedness, of the every-day world, and to plant us for the moment in some miniature garden of Eden, where, in dreamy forgetfulness of the present, we may linger over the sweet, joyous, and careless freedom of the past’. His landscapes have affinities with Samuel Palmer’s dream village in The Bellman. Foster’s painted English countryside was a ‘miniature garden of Eden’ (with provision, of course, for a wild bank in one corner of that garden) – the sweetest of sweet views, masking Surrey’s social problems and luring the Victorian urban middle class into a world of weekend cottages in the Surrey Hills with their fresh air and heathery (or ‘bosky-copsy’) country views. The publication that most successfully reproduced this dreamy refuge for Victorians was Foster’s collection of masterly woodcuts, Pictures of English Landscape, which we shall turn to now.

Pictures of English Landscape Some of Foster’s finest picturesque landscape work is represented in his book of prints Birket Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape, published in 1863. It was the culmination of many years of work as a book illustrator, during which he gained a high reputation for his engraved pictures for books of poetry and his picturesque topography for travel books. A Picturesque Guide to the Trossachs, for instance, published in 1853 by A. & C. Black, with nearly thirty wood engravings by Foster, went into 28 editions over the 189

a sweet view following 36 years. The English Landscape book was the brainchild of the Dalziel brothers, who were responsible for engraving Foster’s designs. They approached him in 1858. They and their publisher Routledge had already collaborated with him to illustrate a range of anthologies of English poetry, including The Home Affections Pourtrayed by the Poets (1858), for which Foster was invited to illustrate a classic sweet view for Coleridge’s ‘Domestic Peace’ (illus. 75). This kind of motif became his forte. In February 1862 Foster received a singular accolade: he was elected a full member of the Society of Painters in Water-colours. That more or less marked the end of his career as a book illustrator and launched him – with formal authority, as it were – as one of England’s most popular (and well-rewarded) landscape watercolourists. The preface to English Landscape alludes to this watershed in his career: ‘The Designs should have the more interest for the public as they are the last works for Wood Engraving likely to be produced by the artist.’ This was no doubt prompted by the publisher as good box office, in the manner of the famous theatrical promotion ‘Positively the Last Appearance on Any Stage of the Celebrated . . .’. Nonetheless, the English Landscape volume proved to be a magnificent farewell to nearly two decades of distinguished work as a designer-engraver. The Dalziels originally proposed a volume containing fifty large-format drawings (18 × 14 centimetres/7 × 5½ in.) of English rustic scenery, with no text. This was subsequently reduced to thirty plates. At some later stage it was decided to introduce an accompanying text consisting of poems inspired by the pictures – thus reversing the authorillustrator partnership that Foster had been used to. The Dalziels first tried to enlist Ten­nyson (with Millais as the intermediary). 190

75 Brothers Dalziel, after Myles Birket Foster, ‘Domestic Peace’, illustration from Charles Mackay, ed., The Home Affections Pourtrayed by the Poets (1883 edition).

Myles Birket Foster

Tennyson declined, and his wife apologized to Millais, explaining that Tennyson had said that ‘Poems do not come to him so.’ The Dalziel brothers then approached Tom Taylor, the playwright and former art critic for The Times. They sent him proofs of the illustrations and he accepted the invitation, noting that he and Foster shared a Tyneside upbringing. The book’s first woodcut is ‘The Green Lane’ (illus. 76), a picture of an ancient track supposedly near Dorking. The arrangement of the composition is much like that of the Hambledon lane scene, with the cottage up on the bank above the sunken sandy lane where a family pauses in its journey. The mother seems to look out towards us. We are beckoned into their peaceful shady lane, only a step or two down from where we stand on the bank viewing the scene. At the same time, in this opening print, we are beckoned into a book whose sweet views will feast the eye and mind on the more secluded beauties of English landscape scenery. As Taylor’s accompanying poem makes clear, the green lane is a retreat from the noise, heat and dust of the main highways. Soft turf replaces stone or asphalt; overhanging trees provide shade; the pace of travel slows. The green lane offers: Green portals arching wide, Green grass below, green leaves o’erhead, Green banks on either side, Topped by the purple oaken pales.

Taylor’s text stresses the colour – the cool, fresh greens – that Foster’s print cannot supply. Everything in the picture tells of benign, refreshing shelter. The natural setting shelters the travelling family, the cottage on the bank with its capacious roof shelters its inmates, the parents pausing in the lane shelter their children. Nature and the human presence are in harmony. The lane itself is both natural and artificial, partly sunken, worn away 191

a sweet view

76 Brothers Dalziel, after Myles Birket Foster, ‘The Green Lane’, illustration from Birket Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape (1863).

by centuries of foot-travellers, waggons and flocks of sheep (some visible further down the lane). The compositional structure reinforces this idea of embosoming shelter. It is set in the usual rectangular frame, but its inner organization is one of concentric ovals enclosing the family in the central middle ground. In the left foreground scanty bushes cast their shadows across the rutted lane to the opposite bank. There a post, with its slight tilt to the right, and the diagonal tangle of 192

Myles Birket Foster

trailers (periwinkle, perhaps) lead the eye up the right margin to follow the reverse curve of the ivy-clad tree as it arches over the top, leaning towards the high, dark elms on the left that bring the eye down to the cottage. The second and inner oval is light against that dark outer one. It begins at the whitewashed cottage wall and drops to the bank that is broken open, its light – presumably sandy – surface catching the sunshine. That curving band of light then curls down right, past the bleached chopped end of the recumbent tree trunk and then up the lane to the cluster of white sheep, to the patches of light beyond, up the incline of the slender, sunlit branch pushing out from behind the ivy-clad tree and into the open sky. The final and slightly darker oval lies on its side and enfolds the resting family and the vegetation immediately behind it. But within that there is chiaroscuro: while the family’s ground line is blurred in the softened shadow, their figures are lit up by the gentle sunshine (green-lane sunshine is always mild and filtered). The oval structuring combines with the trees to embower the family in a tangle of sunlight and shadow, like the husband and wife in their twilit bowery porch in Palmer’s Bellman. The scene is intensely textured, and the hatching very concentrated. Thickets of coarse grass, stalks and brambles dissolve into and sprout out of passages of dense shade, from the mesh of cross-hatching and sprays of tight squiggles (the latter particularly visible in the left foreground). Foster’s calligraphy will suddenly erupt into plant life. The half-dead repoussoir tree on the right is very finely detailed and textured, its rough, dry bark supporting what looks like half-dead ivy. The Dalziels’ wood engraving for this plate is exquisite; ‘very near perfection’ was Foster’s own comment, written on the proof. ‘Green Lane’ is a quiet byway where human activity has slowed right down. So too has the landscape. High up there is a ripple of cloud, but elsewhere little or no movement. The family of four may be connected with the apparently shepherdless flock 193

a sweet view up the lane (the man could be wearing a shepherd’s smock), or they may simply be independent travellers, pausing for a drink from the nearby cottage (the young girl has a pitcher of sorts). The whole scene echoes Constable’s Cornfield – the shady lane, the foreground dog arrested with its head cocked, the humans resting and refreshing themselves, the sheep sauntering on. The only other figure in Foster’s picture is someone working in the cottage garden, whose back appears just above the fence. The relaxed vagueness of the narrative reinforces the peace of this spot, where no one needs to be busy and purposeful. It also encourages leisurely roaming by the viewer, of the kind I have been happily indulging in for some time. This green lane draws one in, to rove through the sunlight and shade, browsing on the rich detail in the banks and trees – content, really, to loiter indefinitely. The sentiment was ardently expressed by William Howitt in his Book of the Seasons (1831): I love our real old English foot paths . . . the smooth, dry track, winding away in easy curves, along some green slope to the church-yard – to the forest-grange – or to the embowered cottage. It is to me an object of certain inspiration . . . What is there so truly English? What is so truly linked with our rural tastes, our sweetest memories, and our sweetest poetry, as stiles and foot paths? Plate 7 in English Landscape is entitled ‘The Farm-yard’ (illus. 77), and it is a distinct contrast to ‘Green Lane’. The yard is a working place (fit for Gilpin’s ‘industrious mechanic’, as against the green lane’s ‘loitering peasant’). Evidence of active industry is everywhere, from the bundled faggots stacked in the foreground, to the woman at the pump, then over the fence to the cows, the ladder and stack of staves, and round to the waggoner in the distance. The zigzag line from the ducks to the woman to the cows and to the man pulls together the humans and the 194

Myles Birket Foster

animals in relaxed harmony. The buildings also link both: the tall gateway that probably houses the carts is also a dovecote. These worn timber, stone, thatch and tile buildings compose a farmyard that has weathered two or three centuries, but is still going about its business with calm steadiness. In spite of its picturesqueness, it is a working farm. It blends animation and tranquillity; the working woman with rolled-up sleeves at the pump, the cows resting (one seeming to be in confrontational mood), the doves in and

77 Brothers Dalziel, after Myles Birket Foster, ‘The Farmyard’, illustration from Birket Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape (1863).

195

a sweet view out of the dovecote, the waggoner with his whip standing in the sunshine, a good breeze driving the banks of cloud. Taylor’s accompanying text draws attention, affectionately, to the particular character of this kind of farmyard scene: Rude plenty everywhere, if somewhat slattern, That seemed akin to Nature’s liberal ways, All alien from the trim right-angled pattern That science fits her farms to now-a-days.

Nature’s ‘liberal ways’ were often briskly dismissed by modernizers who saw in the traditional small farm only economic decline and wasted opportunities. ‘There is no stagnation about a farmhouse,’ protested Samuel Palmer in 1864: ‘All life is there; change – progressive change; production. Of course I mean an old-fashioned farm; not those flat Yahoo-sheds they build now and call “model farms”!’

196

78 Earl of Radnor’s farm buildings, Coleshill Farm, Berkshire, illustration from The Builder, xii/620, 23 December 1854.

Myles Birket Foster

This fondness for the relatively unregulated working farm sees it, for all its dishevelment, as a more natural dispensation, and one that has resisted the modernization of the industry. It is reassuringly irregular in relaxed defiance to the rule of the right angle. Modern science and farming efficiency entailed a new geometry. This was, after all, the period of Victorian High Farming, when model farms were being developed to enhance productivity. One example of such farmyard innovation was the Earl of Radnor’s Coleshill Farm of 1854, publicized in The Builder that year (illus. 78). The enclosures there are examples of ‘the trim right-angled pattern’, except for the curved corners of the boundary. The effect is to compartmentalize the farming regime, in a sharp contrast to the inclusive, mixed nature of the Foster farmyard, where humans and animals coalesce. Coleshill’s high boundary wall shuts off humans and animals from sight of the fields, whereas in the old farmyard there is easy physical and visual access from one to the other. A.W.N. Pugin’s Contrasts (1836) had eloquently distinguished the dehumanizing modern towns, model poorhouses and panopticon prisons from their idealized communitarian medieval counterparts. Pictures of English Landscape is another version of that polemical publication, but with modernized England invisibly implicit (except now and again in Taylor’s poems); it uses the picturesque to make its points about social relations and labour conditions, as it opens up scenes of farmyards, cottage life, wayside inns, harvesting, haymaking and the timber trade. It gives the impression that the old ways of living and working are surviving somewhere in deepest England, where life goes on quietly, untouched by urbanization and industrialization. You have only to find one of those green lanes, like that at the entrance to English Landscape or in the Hambledon watercolour, and follow it down into the heart of the countryside to find yourself in that alternative world. 197

Myles Birket Foster

79 Brothers Dalziel, after Myles Birket Foster, ‘At the Brook-side’, illustration from Birket Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape (1863).

The plates in English Landscape insistently take us away from the modern world, to the ‘cool, sequestered vale of life’ evoked by Thomas Gray in his Elegy more than a century earlier – back to the fancied Old England, where the human presence harmonizes with the natural setting, where we will always find country people at work in the fields and farms or pausing for relaxation at inn, cottage or stile. Those few unpeopled scenes in Foster’s book still carry signs of domesticity – a cottage, grazing sheep, donkeys, cattle. Only one plate features a place that is entirely empty of such traces, except for a slip of pathway in one corner, and this is the one entitled ‘At the Brook-side’ (illus. 79), a very beautiful woodcut of exceptional delicacy in its detailing. We pause on a lightly worn path beside a brook that borders woodland, and we gaze into the dark interior. That obscurity is at the heart of this landscape experience of retreat. It is not constituted as a threatening darkness; the tiny bird flies freely across it, giving it just enough benign animation, and the surrounding undergrowth modulates gently into the gloom. But there it is, the ultimate peaceful English haven. If we half-shut our eyes, the structuring chiaroscuro becomes clearer. A wreath of light is woven round the core of darkness. The eye is caught by the sunshine on the water and moves left up the sunny path and past the bright sprays of ferns and foxgloves to the highlighted trunk of the big tree. From there it passes up to the bunched foliage gleaming in the upper centre. The beckoning bare fork of a branch leans over from the far bank and claws the eye down to the bright filigree of twigs that dip towards the sunlit brook. There is no disturbing human presence. The rabbit nibbles peacefully beside the path. The little bird by the stream pauses in its drinking. The lack of movement encourages us to pause too and feast on the delicately wrought detail, the densely textured tree bark, the wild flowers and grasses, the spidery calligraphy of twigs and the finely modulated shadows in the undergrowth. It is 199

a sweet view an image that condenses much of the feel of all these pictures of English landscape. This benign umbrageous core of stillness represents the heart of England’s pastoral idyll. It is Foster’s version of Palmer’s ‘going-in-itiveness’. ‘Not quite a landscape; a nook rather . . . closed up by trees . . . with a little stream, just a trickle . . . You understand the idea – a sanctuary.’ Yes, Foster would have understood it. So would millions of others. These words come from the novelist Ford Madox Ford, while serving at the Front in the First World War, dreaming of an English rural sanctuary: not a ‘landscape’, but a ‘nook’.

The ‘very essence of England’, for the child Henry James growing up in America, came, so he recalled, from ‘the frontispieces of Birket Foster’. We will review the stock repertoire of rural scenery that constituted this ‘essence of England’ in the final section of this book. For now, we must just register the contribution Foster made to constituting the personality of the English countryside for his contemporaries. Pictures of English Landscape offered a virtual world of moments in the life of country people and their places. ‘How we linger over each picture,’ wrote one reviewer, ‘and dwell on the familiar features of life in the country, far away from the noise and strife of the busy town, and long for the days of summer, when our souls may hold communion with Nature in the cooling shadows of “the Green Lane.”’ Browsing these woodcuts was akin to loitering in their shady retreats, immersing oneself in the textures and play of light in the countryside, half-aware of the murmur of voices, the stir of the farmyard, the swaying breeze in the crown of the elms. This same reviewer called the plates ‘beautiful transcripts of rural scenery’, because they seemed devoid of painterly rhetoric as well as being minutely detailed. Meticulous graphic naturalism gave the illusion of social realism. These carefully edited idylls 200

Myles Birket Foster

presented with such miniaturist handling could just about pass for ‘transcripts’ of real places. Birket Foster’s Pictures didn’t, of course, appeal to Ruskin. While he admired the craftsmanship of the woodcuts, he had much the same feeling about the focus on these Surrey scenes as he had had a decade before in disparaging the ‘garden-rollednursery-maid’s paradise’ of the Surrey setting chosen by Millais for his Ophelia. The Dalziels sent Ruskin a pre-publication set of the plates. He replied politely, remarking that they were ‘very charming in every respect’; however, he did wish that the Dalziels would devote their skill ‘to engraving Landscape which should be better than “charming”, and which would educate public taste as well’. But Foster wasn’t concerned to press the boundaries in the way that Ruskin would have liked, and in the way that Turner had done, although he much admired the great landscapist. He particularly treasured the six Turner watercolours he had hanging in the drawing-room of his Witley home, which included luminous atmospheric washes of the sun in misty clouds. But elsewhere in that drawing-room were the intricately detailed close-ups of wild flowers and birds’ eggs by William Henry Hunt. Foster’s admiration for both Turner and Hunt seems difficult to reconcile – the one a master of the poetic sublime in English landscape, the other a miniaturist of natural objects and countryside still-lifes. Where in this is ‘the very essence of England’? In George Gissing’s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1905) there is a reflection on the Englishness of England’s best-known landscape painters, which bears closely on this matter of contrasting taste in landscapists, and indeed on the theme of this book. The narrator (actually the imaginary author of an ‘irregular diary’) speculates that the neglect of Turner in the later nineteenth century is because of the fact that ‘his genius does not seem to be truly English.’ Turner ‘gives us glorious visions . . . but we miss something which we deem essential’: 201

a sweet view I doubt whether Turner tasted rural England; I doubt whether the spirit of English poetry was in him; I doubt whether the essential significance of the common things which we call beautiful was revealed to his soul. Such doubt does not affect his greatness as a poet in colour and form, but I suspect that it has always been the cause why England could not love him. If any man whom I knew to be a man of brains confessed to me that he preferred Birket Foster, I should smile – but I should understand.

202

six

Writing English Scenery: Richard Jefferies

love the country,’ admitted Leslie Stephen (the eminent ‘I, too, mountaineer as well as man of letters), ‘but I confess – to be

duly modest – that I love it best in books.’ As the English country­ side in its pre-industrial state shrank little by little from the face of England, it passed into books. There were books of prints, such as Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape, and books of descriptive prose, such as Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village and William Howitt’s Book of the Seasons (1831) and The Rural Life of England (1838). Then, in the 1870s and 1880s, Richard Jefferies’s nature writings appeared in magazines and books. Nature may have been driven out of the city, and seemingly therefore beyond the stroll­ able reach of many or most of its teeming inhabitants, but books of nature could find their way back in. Indeed, it was becoming more urgent that books should have this compensatory function, according to Howitt: Books can and do penetrate into every nook of our most extended and crowded cities; but every day these cities and towns enlarge their boundaries, and the sweet face of Nature is hidden from the inhabitants. We should, therefore, not only make our books breathe into the depth of every street, court, and alley . . . but rouse them, like a trumpet, to get out at times, 203

a sweet view and renew that animating fellowship which God designed to be maintained between the soul of man and the beauty of the universe. In books, as in paintings (and increasingly in photographs in the middle and later nineteenth century), English scenery and natural life could be preserved forever for all those, like Stephen, who professed to enjoy the countryside without getting their feet muddy. The solace of English rural life and scenery was provided by painters and writers for a public growing nostalgic for something dimly remembered, or part-remembered and part-imagined, as well as for the increasing numbers of those who had never experienced it directly. How pleasant it was, wrote Stephen, ‘to take down one of the magicians of the shelf . . . and to wander off through quiet country lanes into some sleepy hollow of the past’, in the company of Izaak Walton or George Borrow.

80 Peter Henry Emerson, In Dove Dale (Staffordshire Side), 1880s, photogravure, plate xl from the album ‘The Compleat Angler or the Contemplative Man’s Recreation’, vol. ii (1888), edition 109/250.

204

Writing English Scenery

‘A countryside of the mind’ The countryside became available at second hand, in versions specially prepared as compensation for the loss or inaccessibility of the original. One curious anecdote illuminates this exchange. Near the start of the twentieth century, the writer Edward Thomas set off in search of ‘the heart of England’ (his record of which was published in 1906, with that phrase as its title). As he walked out of London he met an itinerant watercress seller with a basket of wild flowers. They got into conversation, and Thomas learned that the man also painted landscapes: ‘I live in London and paint landscapes at sixpence a-piece, sometimes four or five of them in a morning . . . I usually put a few red flowers in with the sixpenny­ worth.’ He was 68 years old and said his son would succeed him, ‘but badly – badly . . . Because he [son] says that he paints Nature as she is, which is impossible. I make no such mistake, as you shall see – I aim for suggestion.’ The watercress seller then produced one of his own paintings, a dawn landscape: ‘Is not the Golden Age in that sky?’ he asked Thomas. ‘I am glad . . . that you believe in a Golden Age,’ Thomas replied: ‘Literature and art are continually recreating it for us.’ Thomas invited the man to accompany him further out towards the country, but he declined: ‘I cannot go with you. I return to think about the Golden Age.’ The two then headed off in opposite directions, Thomas out to the countryside to find the heart of England, the other back towards London to conjure and sell images of Golden Age landscapes. Thomas’s encounter (no doubt elaborated in the telling) illustrates the way in which an inverse ratio was at work; the diminishing experience of rural life and scenery made the constructed myths of idealized countryside more tenacious, and thus the market for the rural idyll gradually expanded. This alienation happened for many Victorians over just a couple of generations. As Jefferies remarked, ‘the old folk, aged men and countrywomen, 205

a sweet view have for the most part forgotten, if they ever knew, the plants and herbs in the hedges they had frequented from childhood.’ This sense of time passing and memories of country life fading coincided with other conservationist movements to try to capture and preserve the disappearing pre-industrial past. One example was the work of the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London (1875–86), with its melancholy pictures of silent, decaying old coaching inns as they gave way to railway hotels. Jefferies’s role in both mediating the natural world and conserving in words the imagery and feel of the English countryside is the subject of this chapter. Jefferies arrived at the right time. A surge in popular interest in English country scenery seems to have been a particular feature of late Victorian life, around the time when Stephen was reflecting on country books. Martin Wiener, in his study English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (1981), drew on a number of sources to identify the 1880s and 1890s as a period of intensifying hunger for the English countryside, stimulated by (inter alia) Thomas Hardy’s novels in the 1870s and 1880s and the success of the new magazine Country Life in the 1890s. Out of this emerged a distinctive English ‘countryside of the mind’, as Wiener termed it – a concept that Stephen would have warmed to. There had always been a ‘countryside of the mind’, of course, generated by British writers and artists. The whole European pastoral tradition in literature bore witness to that. Raymond Williams in The Country and the City (1973) wrote eloquently of the fab­ rications by writers of successive Golden Ages as each passing generation tried to freeze memories or constructions of rural idylls supposed to have existed in their youth. Donna Landry showed how the ‘invention of the countryside’ was the outcome of a long literary tradition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of contested land usage in the playing out of competing priorities of agriculture and leisure activities. But in the later 206

Writing English Scenery

nineteenth century no single writer did more to mediate and promote the experience of English scenery and natural life than Richard Jefferies. He showed his London readers that nature was, improbably, thriving on their doorstep, not an endangered species in retreat somewhere in remote north Wales or the Scottish Highlands. The titles of some of his books were challenging oxymorons: Wild Life in a Southern County (1879); Nature near London (1883). Country scenery and wildlife were just short journeys away, if one wanted (and could afford) a break from the city. Better still for Londoners of Stephen’s inclination, rather than getting a train out to the Surrey Hills or the Sussex Downs, one could simply walk into the nearby bookshop and take the latest Jefferies volume or magazine article back to one’s armchair. Jefferies was born in 1848 into a Wiltshire farming family, and spent much of his childhood roaming the neighbouring countryside. He began work as a reporter on the local paper in the 1860s and tried his hand at writing novels. His descriptions of rural life and scenery and local history began to attract attention, and he decided to move with his family closer to London in the later 1870s, so as to be within reach of the publishing world there. As a nature writer he hoped to stimulate the urban reader to get to know the features of the countryside and to share the sensations of spending time in that environment. This task was getting harder. Back in 1821 Constable had complained of his urban fellow artists: ‘The Londoners with all their ingenuity as artists know nothing of the feeling of a country life (the essence of Landscape) – any more than a hackney coach horse knows of pasture.’ That made landscape artists and writers all the more purposeful in bringing the country back into the lives of city-dwellers. Just as the market gardener supplied the city with fresh produce from rural farm and orchard, so Jefferies dispatched his rich literary bouquets, culled freshly from the countryside, for the delight and understanding of his city readership. He tried to teach 207

a sweet view them not just the look and the names of wild flowers, trees and birds in their natural habitats, but also less tangible treasures, such as the solace of loitering to gaze for long stretches on the minutiae of natural life. He showed how extraordinary happiness and imaginative energy can bloom from a lingering attention to the most insignificant details – textures, smells, colours, sounds: [The sculpting of flowing water by river rocks] The first shoot of the rapid is smooth and polished like a gem by the lapidary’s art, rounded and smooth as a fragment of torso, and this convex undulation maintains a solid outline. [Rushes growing by a ditch] Green and thick and sappy to the touch, they felt like summer, soft and elastic, as if full of life, mere rushes though they were. [The colour of a dandelion] A bright day or a cloudy, the presence of a slight haze, or the juxtaposition of other colours, alters it very much; for the dandelion is not a glazed colour, like the buttercup, but sensitive. It is like a sponge, and adds to its own hue that which is passing, sucking it up. It needed some training of the mind and eye – indeed, of all the senses – to be able to isolate and absorb detail in this way, and Jefferies was the self-appointed guide for rural neophytes. But even for those willing to learn and assiduous in their study of Jefferies, it was still mighty difficult, as his eulogist Walter Besant confessed: I know very well, because Jefferies has told me so much, what I should be able to see in the hedge and on the bank besides these simple things; yet I cannot see them, for all his teaching. Mine – alas! – are eyes which have looked into shop windows and across crowded streets for half a century, save for certain 208

Writing English Scenery

intervals every year; they are also eyes which need glasses; they are slow to see things unexpected, ignorant of what should be expected; they are helpless when they are turned from men and women to flowers, ferns, weeds and grasses; they are, in fact, like unto the eyes of those men with whom I mostly consort. None of us – poor street-struck creatures! – can see the things we ought to see.

Wild life and the picturesque compromise It was not just the ingrained ‘street-struck’ myopia that limited people’s capacity to see nature freshly, simply and directly, as Jefferies tried to bring it to them. The additional and much more formidable obstacle was the cultural adjustment that, for better or worse, had enabled the late Victorian to adapt to his or her age in all its complexity – to a predominantly urban environment, for example, to industrialization, to a rampant progressivist spirit. Such adaptation inevitably entailed a forgetfulness of rural lore and helped over time to generate a vision of rural life and scenery that narrowed them into clichéd pastoral or leisure commodity. Was it too late to reverse that evolutionary trend, to recover country lore? The narrator in Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’ (1842) typifies one kind of confrontation with this dilemma. He vacillates between an Orientalist soft primitivism and a sharp recoil from such fantasies as he acknowledges that he is really the child of the great progressivist movement of the West: Ah, for some retreat Deep in yonder shining Orient, where my life began to beat; . . . Or to burst all links of habit – there to wander far away, On from island unto island at the gateways of the day . . . 209

a sweet view Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise . . . Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea. There methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind, In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind . . . Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I know my words are wild, . . . I, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains, Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains! . . . I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time –

Bursting those ‘links of habit’ in order to recover some kind of primal vision becomes well-nigh impossible. English nature for the Victorians had to function as the nation’s dream version of those ‘knots of Paradise’. Tennyson’s recoil in the last four lines quoted above entails his reproaching himself for having allowed even his language to become ‘wild’! The title of Jefferies’s book Wild Life in a Southern County raised questions about the term ‘wild’. ‘Nature . . . is not the country,’ Leslie Stephen insisted. By this he meant that the countryside he cherished – or ‘we’ cherished, as he moves from ‘I’ into assuming the collective preference of like-minded late Victorians – is not the scenery of the savage (noble or ‘with narrow foreheads’), nor those ‘raw settlements where man is still fighting with the 210

Writing English Scenery

outside world’. It is instead ‘some region where a reconciliation has been worked out’. ‘We’ are searching for ‘the country which bears the impress of some characteristic social growth; which has been moulded by its inhabitants as the inhabitants by it, till one is as much adapted to the other as the lichen to the rock on which it grows.’ That is a deftly attractive simile because it effectively naturalizes a fraught history of man-nature rapprochements. A countryside of ‘reconciliation’ is in line with the models of English landscape we have seen promoted by Jane Austen through the sentiments of her ‘sensible’ characters (‘English culture’ helping to constitute the ‘sweet view’). It is there also in the Stour valley and Shoreham scenes of, respectively, Constable and Palmer. It makes a national virtue out of the way the landscape carries the ‘impress of some characteristic social growth’ and the ways in which it shapes and is shaped by notions of the English personality. All these projects were under construction throughout the nineteenth century. This collective sense of a countryside whose characteristic identity bears little or no resemblance to a frontier wilderness but is rather a place ‘moulded by its inhabitants as the inhabitants by it’ conforms with the way we have seen writers and artists of the earlier nineteenth century modify the picturesque, purging it of its aesthetic relish for poverty, obsolescence and decay, and domesticating it for a changing cultural climate. The picturesque as it shaped the sweet view for mid-Victorian England now looked for the human and the humane ‘impress’ on the landscape; it looked for scenes of human community cohabiting harmoniously with wild nature, or at least accommodating it as a marginal presence. Two examples may be offered. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village has already been mentioned. She portrayed a countryside (a small Berkshire village and its surroundings) that would have greatly appealed to Stephen: ‘shady and yet sunny . . . where the scenery, without rising into grandeur or 211

a sweet view breaking into wildness, is so peaceful, so cheerful, so varied, and so thoroughly English’ (illus. 81). There, very precisely, is that landscape of ‘reconciliation’ – ‘so thoroughly English’. Mitford makes her village world sound very demure, but there were, in fact, limited touches of ‘wildness’, and these she welcomed. A certain degree of wildness remained integral to her village because it was an unenclosed parish; thus it retained its common, with its gorse and broom and sheep-made paths, ‘turfy, elastic, thymy, and sweet’: [the parish has been fortunate in] preserving the delicious green patches, the islets of wildness amidst cultivation, which form, perhaps, the peculiar beauty of English landscape.

81 William Henry James Boot, ‘The Lane’, illustration from Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village (1879).

212

Writing English Scenery

[The common] is a little sheltered scene, retiring, as it were, from the village; sunk amidst higher lands, hills would be almost too grand a word; edged on one side, by one gay highroad, and intersected by another; and surrounded by a most pictur­esque confusion of meadows, cottages, farms, and orchards; with a great pond in one corner, unusually bright and clear, giving a delightful cheerfulness and daylight to the picture. The ‘islets of wildness’ are contained (in both senses of that word) by the village and its predominantly cultivated surrounding land, so they constitute no threat. Their wildness is domesticated not by invasive intervention, but by preserving its integrity (as ‘islets’) while limiting its scale. Deliberate conservation thus protects the wild, at the same time as it protects the domestic from the wild. The principle is much the same as Foster’s wild bank insulated from the surrounding cultivation of his garden. The village thus manages to frame the wild, by analogy with the picturesque tourists’ practices (and note how often Mitford presents the village in pictorial terms). The presence of the wild in these pockets is counterpointed by the adjacent cultivated land and the village itself, so it simply adds to that ‘picturesque confusion’ of diverse landscape components, all on a relatively small scale, that constitutes ‘the peculiar beauty of English landscape’. A comparable example of accommodating the wild can be seen in contemporary attitudes to gypsies. The common stood as a version of wildness in Victorian England, partly because of its agricultural intractability, but also because it was proverbially the haunt of gypsies (illus.82); and gypsies haunted the imagination of cultivated Victorians. For the rebellious child Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), the ‘mysterious illimitable common, where there were sandpits to hide in, and one was out of everybody’s reach, had always made part of [her] picture of 213

a sweet view

gypsy life’ (ch. 11). ‘Here and there,’ writes Stephen, ‘in country lanes, and on the edges of unenclosed commons, we may still meet the gipsy – the type of a race adapted to live in the interstices of civilization, having something of the indefinable grace of all wild animals, and yet free from the absolute savagery of the genuine wilderness.’ The gypsy presence in these English borderlands represented a cultural hybrid in the mind of many Victorians, a figure living at the margins of modernity but retaining an ancient savagery with a frisson of the sublime. Half-wild and halfcultivated, the gypsy existed in a curious relation to that condition of ‘reconciliation’ embedded in English constructions of countryside. Gypsies seemed to Jefferies ‘a bit out of the distant Orient under our Western oaks’. That is a remark that recalls the Locksley Hall hero’s dilemma – primitive Orient or progressive Occident – and bears on Victorian orientalism more generally. 214

82 Robert Walker Macbeth, Gypsy Girl, c. 1875–80, oil on board.

Writing English Scenery

In these and other ways wild nature could be muted, contained and safely protected, but allowed its limited exercise and its erratic, irregular, rough-hewn character nonetheless. An example of its antithesis in the Victorian environment was encountered by Jefferies when, during a Sunday walk, he came across a red-brick bethel chapel; for him this building ‘combined everything that could be imagined contrary to the spirit of nature, which undulates’. Nature ‘undulates’. This generalized characterization foreshadows Roland Barthes’s teasing claim that ‘The picturesque is found any time the ground is uneven.’ Cultivation and the wild are carried into a new kind of discourse in this later Victorian period, especially in the various ways in which the city was seen to be inimical to the preservation of the picturesque. The city was a homogenizing force on human beings, whereas the country allowed a wilder and more colourful heterogeneity to thrive. ‘The country’, Stephen remarked, ‘means a region where men have not been ground into the monotony by the friction of our social mill.’ In the city the angular, the irregular, is rubbed smooth by the pressures of social conformity (except for the outcast poor) and therefore wholly unpicturesque. This concept of the ‘social mill’ was current earlier in the century. Tennyson, in In Memoriam (lyric 89), fondly recalled his lost friend Hallam defending the same idea, and railing against the city’s effect of eroding the picturesque: For ‘ground in yonder social mill We rub each other’s angles down, ‘And merge,’ he said, ‘in form and gloss The picturesque of man and man.’

Thus one of the important functions of the countryside – whether ‘of the mind’ or in actuality – was to provide a rich supply of the newly constituted picturesque (variations on 215

a sweet view ‘parasitical sublimity’) in opposition to the city’s drive to uniformity, regularity and the ‘social mill’. This would be achieved in England by ensuring the survival of the wild as a small-scale contained presence, carried by paintings, prints, photographs and nature essays into the heart of urban England. That was Jefferies’s role.

Writings from ‘the borderline of nature’ In September 1879 Anthony Trollope contributed an essay to the magazine Good Words, a monthly publication with a religious mission, as its title suggests. The essay was entitled ‘A Walk in a Wood’. ‘The most difficult thing that a man has to do is to think,’ he declared, and to think properly, deeply and freely, it was necessary to find the peace of a wood; you must make sure that ‘you have got out of the conventional into the natural’. To insulate yourself from ‘the conventional’, he continues, you must have trees around you, many trees; in fact, you must feel that ‘if not lost, you are lose-able.’ Then you can think. But where can you be sure of finding such dense woods in 1870s England? ‘England, dear England . . . has advanced almost too far for this.’ Fortunately, Trollope knows of some ‘sweet woodland nooks, shaws, and holts’ in Devon, through which ‘clear water brooks run, and the birds sing sweetly, and the primroses bloom early, and the red earth pressing up here and there gives a glow of colour.’ The search for those ‘sweet woodland nooks’ comes as an echo of Samuel Palmer’s quest. Devon, though, was a long way to travel for those in England’s great centres of population, those perhaps most needing to be able ‘to think properly, deeply and freely’ in Trollope’s woodland locus amoenus. Jefferies suggested much closer natural refuges for the Londoner, so close as to stretch the townsman’s credibility that real nature could be reached within a twenty-minute train journey from Charing Cross station. ‘There is a frontier line to 216

Writing English Scenery

civilization,’ he wrote in the Preface to Wild Life in a Southern County, ‘and not far outside the great centres we come quickly even now to the borderline of nature.’ He is perhaps the principal figure in the later Victorian mediating of country life and the natural world for a predominantly urbanized public. In their different ways Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels performed comparable functions in the same period. Indeed, Hardy and Jefferies were sometimes associated as authoritative writers on rural life, as when in 1883 Longman’s Magazine commissioned both to write articles on English rural labour (Jefferies’s ‘The Wiltshire Labourer’ and Hardy’s ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’). By analogy with the gypsy’s cultural positioning, Jefferies’s work focused on the ‘interstices of civilisation’. He found a borderland between the city and the wild (and also another kind of border, as we shall see later, between traditional country life and work and the new age of mechanized agriculture), and he committed himself to documenting its natural life. Lynne Hapgood has summarized Jefferies’s position as straddling ‘the fissures of late Victorian culture and society, attempting to earn his living in the London marketplace while writing about the countryside, and simultaneously trying to transform it into a locus of spiritual meaning for a mass readership’. How did he prepare for this agenda? Walter Besant remarked in his biography of Jefferies: ‘In order to read this book [of Nature] aright, one must live apart from one’s fellow-men . . . one must go to Nature’s school from infancy . . . all day long the sun must burn his cheek, the wind must blow upon it, the rain must beat upon it; he must never be out of reach of the fragrant wild flowers and the call and cry of the birds.’ It is a demanding apprenticeship, but was it right in Jefferies’s case? He may have been a solitary wanderer in his country walks, but he was also by the mid-1870s a married man with a child and a pressing need to capitalize on his nature writing in order to support his family. As we have seen, Jefferies moved from Wiltshire 217

a sweet view to Tolworth (in the Surbiton district) in 1877, and he remained there with his family until 1881, at 2 Woodside. He chose Surbiton because it had a reputation for being the healthiest of the London suburbs while at the same time being within easy reach of his main market, the London publishers for his books and magazine essays about country life. (Hardy had also lived in Surbiton briefly, in 1874, the year when Far from the Madding Crowd was published in instalments illustrated by Helen Allingham.) Jefferies had assumed that since he would be only about 20 kilometres (12 mi.) from the city centre he would be sacrificing the experience of wildlife, but ‘my preconceived views of the subject were quite overthrown by the presence of as much bird-life as I had been accustomed to in distant fields and woods.’ The Ordnance Survey map of 1878 shows Jefferies’s Surbiton neighbourhood in 1865 (illus. 83). Woodside and Woodside Villas

218

83 First Edition Ordnance Survey, surveyed 1865, published 1878, Surrey sheet xii8.

Writing English Scenery

can be seen as two blocks of terraced houses on the south side of the Ewell Road, sitting relatively isolated amid common-land fields and woodland. Jefferies was only 5 or 6 kilometres (3 or 4 mi.) from those Hogsmill River sites where (as mentioned in the previous chapter), a quarter of a century before, Millais had painted his Ophelia landscape and Holman Hunt his Hireling Shepherd meadows. ‘Woodside’ was so named because next to Jefferies’s neighbour, in No. 1, was a wood. This was the copse referred to in Jefferies’s ‘Round about a London Copse’, situated ‘in the angle formed by two suburban roads . . . the trees in it overshadow some villa gardens’: that is to say, Jefferies’s back garden. Woodland trees may have literally overshadowed his back garden, but at the same time the great figurative shadow of London cast its length over Jefferies’s new life in Tolworth. This was welcome in many ways. He admitted to being ‘magnetized’ by ‘the unseen influence of mighty London [even] under the calm oaks’ in the Surrey countryside. That magnetism came from ‘the presence of man in his myriads’; there is ‘something in the heart which cannot be satisfied away from it’. The experience of being deprived of London was vividly imagined in Jefferies’s postapocalyptic fantasy After London; or, Wild England (1885), in which ‘man in his myriads’ decomposed in the poisonous marshland that replaced low-lying London, while the higher ground around it reverted to virtually impenetrable forest – re-wilding with a vengeance. The books Jefferies wrote during the Tolworth years were deliberate mediations of country life and scenery for the city-dweller. Indeed, at least one commentator felt that, paradoxical as it may have seemed, it was the great city that transformed Jefferies’s essays into nature writing of a lyrical kind, as he accentuated the English countryside’s distinctive properties in contrast to the neighbouring city.

219

a sweet view

A language for writing nature Jefferies, however, was not simply furnishing sweet-view wordpictures to his city readers. He was trying to communicate the felt experience of the natural world. For that he needed a language of relaxed intensity that could generate visual description combined with evocation of the countryside’s sounds and smells. But how can the writer transfer his living local countryside into books and keep it alive once it is cast in words? Jefferies seems one of the least literary or self-conscious of writers, yet he confessedly struggled with the challenge of transmitting the experience of his natural world. He would have sympathized with Henry David Thoreau’s demands: ‘where is the literature which gives expression to Nature?’ Where is the language that can transfer to the page words ‘with earth adhering to their roots . . . [words] so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library’? That was the kind of language Jefferies wanted, an instrument not just for informing but also for immersing his urban reader in the countryside. Words themselves have long lost any earthy roots they might have had. Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks (2015) was an endeavour, part-glossary in form, to re-wild the language of natural description by retrieving old vernacular terms that now seem to us to have something of ‘the earth adhering to their roots’. Jefferies’s contemporary Gerard Manley Hopkins minted new words and striking compounds in his poetry to revitalize the linguistic resources for evoking nature. He wanted a language that would embody the haecceitas or ‘thisness’ of natural forms – their essential ‘inscape’, as he called it – such as the bluebell flower or a spray of chestnut leaves or fans of sea-surf on the sand. Jefferies, like Thoreau and Hopkins, wrestled with the limitations of language in capturing the beauties of nature: ‘I have felt very earnestly my 220

Writing English Scenery

own incompetence to give the least idea of their brilliancy and many-sided colours.’ For one contemporary landscape artist, Jefferies’s gift for expression was incomparable, and unmatchable in paint. John William North struggled with the expressive limitations of paint in transmitting the experience of the English countryside. ‘I have been trying by a different art for thirty years’, he wrote, ‘to convey the idea to others of some such [countryside] subjects, and I feel with shame that in the work of half a year I do not get so near the heart and truth of nature as he [Jefferies] in one paragraph.’ North was far too modest. He had an uncanny ability to capture the characteristic moods and textures of English scenery, as in his enthralling winterscape (illus. 84). Can a painting be immersive? In Winter’s . . . Spite the viewer is immediately waist high in undergrowth, taking in the sun as it sinks into that purple chill behind the filigree trees. North and Jefferies collaborated on at least one occasion, when North illustrated Jefferies’s essay ‘Summer in Somerset’ in 1887. Words themselves may have irrecoverably lost their earthy roots, but perhaps they could be used to weave a lexical cage to capture their wild subjects alive. This is suggested by Edward Thomas in his book on Jefferies: ‘Lighter than gossamer, words can entangle and hold fast all that is loveliest, and strongest, and fleetest, and most enduring in heaven and earth.’ Two sentences later, Thomas reaches for another metaphor: ‘Jefferies’ words . . . are like a glassy covering of the things described.’ Jefferies’s language is plain and clear, with few rhetorical warps or whorls in the glass to distort the view of the country scenery. Thomas’s figurative comparison reminds me (as I’m so often reminded in this book) of Victorian ornamental bell jars enclosing preserved wild flowers and stuffed birds, displayed on desks or mantelpieces or small tables in those airless and over-furnished rooms, with maybe also a dusty stag’s head on the wall. The preservative 221

a sweet view 84 John William North, When Winter’s Wasteful Spite Was Almost Spent, 1892, oil on canvas.

function of Jefferies’s writings has some analogy to these domestic ornaments (however he might have baulked at that idea), and this aligns him with the work of Foster and other writers and artists of the English countryside. Their work asserted the living freshness of the world they portrayed, at the same time as embalming it for their readers and viewers – especially for those who preferred their countryside in books. Jefferies might have echoed the wish expressed by another writer on rural life and work, George Sturt (who wrote under the pseudonym George Bourne): ‘I should like this book to hold as much of out-doors as I can bring home; as some people put leaves between the pages of their books.’ Living leaves held between two dead leaves . . . words lying ‘half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library’ . . . these are the problems inherent in trying to give life to nature through language. Much the same difficulty confronted the artist: ‘I wonder whether painting can embody an equivalent to what you are now enjoying in the fields,’ Samuel Palmer wrote to a friend in the country. ‘Picture-fields smell of paint, picture lambs won’t bleat and distant church bells are silent.’ But, despite Jefferies’s frustration with his medium, he succeeded 222

Writing English Scenery

85 Portrait engraving of Jefferies from Walter Besant, Eulogy of Richard Jefferies, 4th impression (1905).

for many: ‘By the spell of his imagination he gathers the . . . fields into every room where he is read.’ How did he do this? Jefferies was formidably knowledgeable about the natural world, and indeed for some he too often fell into long inventories of flora and fauna. He felt he had to identify the wild flowers, trees and birds, and to give them their old English common nomenclature as part of the mission to assert the distinctive identity of England’s countryside and refamiliarize his countrymen with their lost habitat. In this endeavour, his text is strewn with names. Sometimes a whole paragraph can seem little more than a botanical list, although there’s a pungency in clustering those vernacular names: yellow rattle, stonecrop, houseleek, honeysuckle, cowslip, dog rose. Here is one characteristic passage, in which Jefferies pores over tiny details in a wooded dell in late autumn, ‘Just before Winter’ (as the essay is called): In the lanes that lead down to the ‘shaws’ [small patches of old woodland] in the dells, the ‘gills’, as these wooded depths are called, buckler ferns, green, fresh, and elegantly fashioned, remain under the shelter of the hazel-lined banks. From the tops of the ash wands, where the linnets so lately sang, coming up from the stubble, the darkened leaves have been blown, and their much-divided branches stand bare like outstretched fingers. Black-spotted syc­­a­­more leaves are down, but the moss grows thick and deeply green; and the trumpets of the lichen seem to be larger . . . Brown lie the acorns, yellow where they were fixed in their cups; two of these cups seem almost as large as the great acorns from abroad. 223

a sweet view A red dead-nettle, a mauve thistle, white and pink bramble flowers, a white strawberry, a little yellow tormentil, a broad yellow dandelion, narrow hawkweeds, and blue scabious, are all in flower in the lane. The crowding of detail produces a rich density and range of colour and texture as well as botanical information. The effect may be picturesque in its stimulating variety, but Jefferies’s massing of visual data is not easily picturable. The concentration of vegetation blurs now and again – it is almost too much to take in and retain before the next consignment of natural data – and yet out of this blur comes the occasional striking single image, such as the branches stretching open like fingers. In this respect – the broad effect – North’s winter landscape becomes a remarkably close analogue in paint. In 1893 (six years after Jefferies’s death) the writer and anthologist Arthur Quiller-Couch declared that ‘there are few things more pitiable than the transports of your Cockney critic over Richard Jefferies,’ and he lambasted those writers who slavishly followed Jefferies’s inventorial descriptive method. He quoted a passage from Wild Life in a Southern County and then performed a mock pastiche ‘natural history’ of London’s Old Brompton Road, achieving, as he believed, ‘a pretty exact application of Jefferies’ method’. Jefferies’s books, he claimed sardonically, ‘are already supplying the club-novelist with his open-air effects; and, therefore, the club-novelist worships them’. Quiller-Couch’s attack on Jefferies’s methods was countered in the same year by Peter Anderson Graham, author of Nature in Books (1891) and later editor of Country Life. Graham objected to Jefferies being ‘persistently misrepresented as addicted to catalogue-making’: When he one by one enumerates the birds and flowers and weeds of an English hedgerow, you feel, in the end, that his 224

Writing English Scenery

object has been neither botanical nor ornithological, but poetical. It is not into the study of a zoologist you have gone, but to the presence of an artist who has transferred a mood from his own mind into yours. So – pedestrian or poetic? Catalogues or canticles? Both. His modern biographer and critic W. J. Keith has remarked that Jefferies’s ‘contribution was to bring back to the public a sense of nature, as opposed to isolated natural objects’. That is a useful distinction; however – again – Jefferies did both. He recuperated the names and traits of birds and wild flowers, sometimes at some descriptive length, for a readership whose knowledge and memory of such things were fading. But he also, as did North’s landscapes, re-created the sensory experience of being absorbed into that world, and thereby ‘transferred a mood’. The point is that he achieved the latter partly by means of the former, by a cumulative act of flooding the reader’s mind with the abundance of named natural flora and fauna of the English countryside. He particularized as a route to poetic generalizing. The sweet view was ‘sweet to the eye and mind’; the spiritual reverie that he could instil in his reader is generated once he has immersed that reader in the massed physical presence of named natural objects. Thus the floating reverie always has a fibrous anchor deep in the solid earth, from which the countryside’s sounds, smells, colours and textures emanate. ‘Hence it is that a flower is to me so much more than stalk and petals,’ he wrote in ‘The Pageant of Summer’. Among the various attempts to pin down the generic identity of Jefferies’s writings, there is one suggestion that is particularly interesting. Graham declared in 1893 that he would choose to call Jefferies an ‘impressionist’. He is a little squeamish about using the term (which was then barely twenty years old), fearing that it is part of ‘the literary slang of the day’ and that there are several writers and artists ‘who misname themselves impressionists’. One 225

a sweet view might also argue that Jefferies eludes any such single art-historical designation and instead passes through several ‘isms’: Realism, Naturalism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism. He was a scrupulous documenter of the natural scene, but would certainly also have been sympathetic to the Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne’s belief that ‘Painting from nature is not copying the object, it is realizing one’s sensations.’ Edward Thomas said of Jefferies: ‘The emotion connected with an object was usually more vivid in his mind than the object itself, notwithstanding his powerful and faithful sight.’ ‘Impressionist’ is a very apt characterization of Jefferies for three reasons. Firstly, it rightly associates him with a movement that articulated the artist’s subjective sensuous responses in representing the motif. Second, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists were concerned to renew vision, as was Jefferies; they wanted to see past the conventional pictorial tradition and recover something like the child’s fresh vision of the natural world. Third, the Impressionists and Jefferies were prepared to defy academy decorum in terms both of treatment and of the range of motifs admissible into a landscape picture. Impressionism embraced the modern world – the world of the steam train and the new boulevards of the teeming metropolis – and so did Jefferies. In all three respects Jefferies’s achievement aligns him with the (capital ‘I’) Impressionist agenda. I have already suggested the case for the first two – the passion to engage the sensuous experience of nature as well as recover a primal vision of it – so let us now take the third, the absorption of modernity and its presence in the country scene.

Writing the changing English scene It is true that Jefferies was passionate about preserving the old, but that did not exclude a willingness to incorporate the new into the traditional, when focusing the sweet view of rural England in 226

Writing English Scenery

the late nineteenth century. In this respect he differs significantly from Palmer and Foster. Let me say something first about his conservationist role and its contemporary cultural context, and then we can consider his attitude to modernity. He belonged to a period when there was an increased urgency about land conservation. This was fuelled by a complex mix of (inter alia) Wordsworthian transcendentalism and belief in the moral power of nature, together with a Ruskinian emphasis on the link between social health and environmental beauty. The Commons Preservation Society was key in these movements. Campaigns to save London’s commons (among them Wimbledon, Tooting and Epping Forest) took place in the late 1860s and early 1870s. A similar impetus – and indeed some of the same influential writers – helped to launch the Arts and Crafts movement a decade or so later. A proposal for a ‘Society for the Diffusion of Beauty’, designed to improve the quality of life and environment for the poor, developed into the founding of the Kyrle Society in 1875–6, in which Octavia Hill took a leading role. Its Open Spaces Subcommittee campaigned to preserve the rural areas on the edges of London, no doubt contributing to that ‘Nature near London’ that Jefferies was to celebrate in essays written during his time in Tolworth from the late 1870s. As we have seen, the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London was founded in 1875. The National Trust (an outcome of the continuing campaign movement of the Kyrle Society) was founded in 1895. Old London was passing away, as was Old England’s countryside, and the published fruits of Jefferies’s solitary rambles were pulled into the current of this larger movement. It was not just urban spread in its physical manifestations that was making the deeper change to the cultural climate. An invisible city culture seemed to be spreading beyond the actual topographical confines of the cities. Here is how Jefferies puts it:

227

a sweet view There were towns, of course, seventy years ago, but even the towns were penetrated with what, for want of a better word, may be called country sentiment. Just the reverse is now the case; the most distant hamlet which the wanderer in his autumn ramblings may visit, is now more or less permeated with the feelings and sentiments of the city. The swelling city’s influence was denaturing England in other ways. Over the middle decades of the century suburbia as well as the country gardens of the prosperous had become showcases for extravagant horticultural experiments with foreign imports of subtropical exotics among the great banks of rhododendrons and stands of ornamental conifers. Native hardy plants were becoming an endangered species in the English garden. This manifestation of the disappearing Englishness of England’s gardens was passionately opposed by Jefferies, just as it was by the garden writer William Robinson, whose The Wild Garden (1870) and The English Flower Garden (1883) slowly turned the tide back towards cultivating native wild flowers in gardens. Jefferies noticed (around 1880, during the Tolworth period) that even where the large houses on the edge of London were developing their gardens to create oases of natural life, they were marginalizing the native trees and shrubs that might have been incorporated: There are acacias, sumachs, cedar deodaras, araucarias, laurels, planes, beds of rhododendrons, and so on . . . [If a] search were made in these enclosures for English trees and English shrubs, it would be found that none have been introduced. The English trees, timber trees, that are there, grew before the house was built; for the rest, the products of English woods and hedgerows have been carefully excluded.

228

Writing English Scenery

The old and largely indigenous trees, shrubs and hedgerows, now excluded by design or neglect, had to be somehow recovered and preserved, and no one knew more of those countryside features than Jefferies. ‘There entered gradually into his mind a greater quantity of natural England, her leaves and flowers, her winds and skies, her wild things and tame, her beauties and humours and discomforts, than was ever, perhaps, the possession of writing Briton.’ So wrote William Ernest Henley, for whose Magazine of Art Jefferies had written several essays in the 1880s. Jefferies comes to seem a kind of memory bank or intellectual seed vault for the traditional English countryside – a one-man conservation body. We would be drawing on that bank for our cultural future, according to Henley: in years to be, when the whole island is one vast congeries of streets, and the fox has gone down to the bustard and the dodo, and outside museums of comparative anatomy the weasel is not and the badger has ceased from the face of the earth, it is not doubtful that the Gamekeeper and Wild Life and the Poacher – epitomizing, as they will, the rural England of certain centuries before – will be serving as material and authority for historical descriptions, historical novels, historical epics, historical pictures, and will be honoured as the most useful stuff of their kind in being. The continuity of the old English countryside would be safest inside those books. That is certainly one aspect of Jefferies’s achievement, and it may have been the one for which he is most cherished. It is, however, a mistake to classify him simply as an antiquarian conservationist of English scenery, or – worse – a curator of the old pastoral idyll. He confronted and accommodated the new in the changing English countryside. Take this set of declarations from one of his late essays, ‘Walks in the Wheat Fields’: 229

a sweet view People of the easel would not find it easy to depict the halfgreen, half-made hay floating in the air behind a haymaking machine. Sunlight falls on modern implements just the same as on the old wooden plough and the oxen. To be true, pictures of our fields should have them both, instead of which all the present things are usually omitted, and we are presented with landscapes that might date from the first George. Turner painted the railway train and made it at once ideal, poetical, and classical. His ‘Rain, Steam, and Speed,’ which displays a modern subject, is a most wonderful picture. If a man chose his hour rightly, the steam-plough under certain atmospheric conditions would give him as good a subject as a Great Western train. He who has got the sense of beauty in his eye can find it in things as they really are, and needs no stagey time of artificial pastorals to furnish him with a sham nature. Idealise to the full, but idealise the real, else the picture is a sham. To ‘idealise the real’ and to see beauty ‘in things as they really are’: these are boldly inclusive claims for someone whose reputation depended on his ‘epitomizing . . . the rural England of certain centuries before’. But Jefferies’s descriptive practice accommodated modern developments in agriculture. Perhaps that last statement needs to be qualified. Jefferies watched nature itself accommodating these material, mechanical innovations as they became more common in English fields: ‘The earth has a way of absorbing things that are placed upon it, of drawing from them their stiff individuality of newness, and throwing over them something of her own antiquity.’ As soon as the new appears it is subject to weathering and wear (a reassurance to the aficionado of the picturesque); its ‘nature is subdued/ To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand’, as Shakespeare’s sonnet cxi put it. Here is how Jefferies puts it: ‘As the furrow smooths and brightens the share, as the mist eats away the sharpness of the iron angles, so in a larger 230

Writing English Scenery

manner, the machines sent forth to conquer the soil are conquered by it, become a part of it, and as natural as the old, old scythe and reaping hook. Thus already the new agriculture has grown hoar.’ So, because Jefferies describes nature, and because nature relentlessly naturalizes the mechanical, there is for him no dichotomy.

Self and nature The one thing that Jefferies found most resistant to being absorbed into nature was himself. He yearned most strongly to be at one with the nature he celebrates, but nature had no reciprocating interest in that: ‘All nature, the universe as far as we see, is anti-, or ultra-human, outside, and has no concern with man.’ But isn’t that also part of nature’s magnetic pull, its status as the longed-for Other, against which we measure our passage into modernity? The Impressionist agenda was to close that gap between the artist and his or her motif, to paint the sensations triggered by the object and not just the object (in Cézanne’s terms). It was much the same in Claude Monet’s terms: ‘To me the motif itself is an insignificant factor; what I want to reproduce is what lies between the motif and me.’ Jefferies often catches himself railing against this ultimate estrangement from the things he most loves. Here is a Victorian citizen of the most advanced country in Europe, if not the world (the ‘heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time’, as Tennyson put it in ‘Locksley Hall’), sometimes wishing away all that heritage and envying the caveman and the caveman’s nearest surviving descendant, the gypsy (‘primeval man with primeval nature’). ‘He [the caveman] was face to face with the earth, the sun, the night; face to face with himself. There was nothing between; no wall of written tradition; no built-up system of culture – his naked mind was confronted by naked earth.’ Jefferies wanders in the fields and woods and adores the trees opening their arms to the wind, the hedgerow birds, the swelling 231

a sweet view green banks crowded with wild flowers. His words caress their texture, sway to their movement, sing to their music. When he sees poppies brimming in the July grass, ‘I wish I could do something more than gaze at all this scarlet and gold and crimson and green, something more than see it, not exactly drink it or inhale it, but in some way to make it a part of me that I might live it.’ The impulse resembles Palmer’s ‘going-in-itiveness’. It is a kind of love-making: those ecstatic moments of almost-realizing the beloved other as a ‘part of me that I might live’ in her or him. The human mind wedded to the natural world in ‘this great consummation’ was Wordsworth’s theme, and his poetry was its ‘spousal verse’. With a greater physical sensuousness than Wordsworth, this became Jefferies’s great theme too. No Victorian writer sustained this ‘spousal’ devotion with such ardour and so consistently as Jefferies. He was ultimately devastated by the thought that after decades of uxorious but unreciprocated passion, he would leave behind a widowed English countryside with no one to replace him, no one to write its special beauties as he had done. In August 1887, housebound by illness and near death at the age of 38, Jefferies wrote some plaintive sentences, the last to be written in his own hand: ‘I wonder to myself how they can all get on without me.’ Was he thinking of his readers? No. He was thinking of the constituency he had served with the greatest passion: I wonder to myself how they can all get on without me – orchis-flower and cowslip. I cannot number them all. I hear, as it were, the patter of their feet – flower and buds, and the beautiful clouds that go over, with the sweet rush of rain and burst of sun glory among the leafy trees. They go on, and I am no more than the least of the empty shells that strewed the sward of the hill.

232

Pa rt iii ‘The Very Essence of England’

seven

English Rural Scenery: A Repertoire

Beyond doubt, the most salient characteristic of life

in this latter portion of the 19th century is its speed, – what we may call its hurry, the rate at which we move, the high-pressure at which we work. William Greg, ‘Life at High Pressure’ (1875)]

W

86 Myles Birket Foster, The Village Oak, n.d., watercolour.

illiam Greg’s essay on the spirit of the age in the later nineteenth century, ‘Life at High Pressure’ (1874), examined the physical and moral consequences of ‘this double quick time’ in most areas of life in later Victorian England: ‘We have no time to reflect where we have been and whither we intend to go; what we have done and what we plan to do, still less what is the value, and the purpose, and the price of what we have seen, and done, and visited.’ The sweet view of the English countryside, its repose and its apparent continuity with the slower cultural life of earlier ages, grew out of the experience of continual and accelerating upheaval. The imagery of that idyll congealed in inverse ratio to the acceleration of change elsewhere; the purpose of these final chapters is to take stock of that imagery. In spite of all their progressivist impulses, the Victorians looked backwards almost as energetically as they looked forwards. Their revivalist movements (Pugin’s Gothic, Pre-Raphaelitism, 235

a sweet view the Ruskin-inspired romantic medievalism in the Arts and Crafts movement) and their conservationist movements (the Commons Preservation Society of 1865, William Morris and Philip Webb’s Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877, the National Trust of 1895) were vigorous in trying to counteract the disorientating effect of rapid social and environmental change, especially in the great urban centres. London itself was changing as fast as anywhere else in the country, and jeopardizing the sense of English cultural continuity. With every demolition of an old building the English were losing a fragment of their history. ‘The Old has passed away,’ Thomas Carlyle declared in 1831, but ‘the Time is still in pangs of travail with the New.’ The fear of the arch anti-restorers, Ruskin and Morris, was that well-meaning partial restoration (rather than preservation) was an act of arrogant vandalism. Ancient buildings, if not interfered with, ‘will elevate and educate, not only ourselves, but our sons, and our sons’ sons’, wrote Morris; such buildings will tell their ‘tale of change and progress . . . a record of history’. Accelerating change meant that the material cultural heritage seemed to be in jeopardy almost as its foundations were being laid. Thus, for instance, many parts of London even during Dickens’s lifetime had become known as ‘Dickens’s London’, through the strong associations with the London of his novels and shorter stories. But those buildings and streets were disappearing so rapidly that Matthew Arnold even suggested, ‘I should like to see them all placed carefully under glass.’ The Victorians were fond of putting much of their precious world under glass. The Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace did that for them, as did the glazed showcases of spectacular dioramas. Over several decades elaborate glass cases were returning to England from all parts of the world, bringing in rare and exotic plants. Bell jars and terrariums displayed stuffed birds and fish, butterflies and seashells, dried wild-flower arrangements. One wonders if the Victorians 236

English Rural Scenery

might have wished to preserve their actual countryside inside some gigantic Wardian case, as well as behind glass in representations by Foster and Allingham. The small scale of characteristic English scenery might have encouraged such fantasies of preservation. The retrospective gaze of the Victorians on rural England was earnest, lingering and softly focused. It was a steadying of the mind and spirit before confronting the dizzying changes of modernity. ‘Nothing changes in our country life,’ wrote the historian of English village life P. H. Ditchfield in 1908; the ‘stability’ of the English country village was ‘one of its greatest charms’. This vision of the countryside as the fixed sanctuary of Old England was sentimental idealization, assisted by the work of many of the writers and artists we have been discussing. Change there certainly was in the country, as we have seen throughout this book, but it seemed to be happening at a slower pace than in the cities, and that gradualism could seem like attractive stasis, as we saw in Chapter Three. ‘Even change was old in that old place,’ remarked the narrator of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (ch. 52), having delivered Little Nell from a threatening London and brought her through the nightmarish industrial cities of the Midlands to the reassuringly ancient country village that was to be her final resting place. The darker side of changelessness was stagnation, anathema to those who shared the Victorian progressivist spirit. The picturesque, with its devotion to scenes and objects in slow obsolescence, had to shield its eyes from the eventual, terminal consequences of its stimulating spectacles of decay. Margaret Hale, the heroine of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), confronted such dilemmas when, near the end of the novel, she returned to her old home in pretty, rural southern England (the main topographical focus of my book) after her tumultuously testing encounters with the industrial north and its new energy:

237

a sweet view Places were changed – a tree gone here, a bough there, bringing in a long ray of light where no light was before – a road was trimmed and narrowed, and the green straggling pathway by its side enclosed and cultivated. A great improvement it was called; but Margaret sighed over the old picturesqueness, the old gloom, and the grassy wayside of former days. (ch. 46) She reflects wearily on her next steps, even thinking of taking the veil to ‘seek heavenly steadfastness in earthly monotony’. But then, a little later, comes this recognition: ‘After all it is right . . . If the world stood still, it would retrograde and become corrupt . . . the progress of all around me is right and necessary.’ Progress, change and repose; energy and stasis – the idyll of the English countryside is caught up in such debates throughout the Victorian period. The idea that the countryside was the place of refreshing stasis, without entailing retrogression and stagnation, was promoted throughout the century in compositions on page and canvas. And to serve that ideal of immutability, the idyll recruited a limited but endlessly repeated repertoire of motifs that signified deepest rural England. These motifs hardly changed at all – that was their appeal – and they are the subject of this chapter.

‘The very essence of England’, Henry James reflected at the end of the century, ‘has a way of presenting itself with completeness in almost any fortuitous combination of rural objects at all, so that, wherever you may be, you get, reduced and simplified, the whole of the scale.’ The ready accessibility of such combinations of these countryside motifs and their concentration into a small space were particularly striking to James and to others. Sometimes, as recorded by John Clare, just a pause in a country walk revealed the perfect locus amoenus, complete with the 238

English Rural Scenery

standard props: ‘Old narrow lanes, where trees meet overhead;/ Path-stiles, on which a steeple we espy,/ Peeping and stretching in the distant sky’. Little village, church steeple, cottages, fields bordered by ancient hedgerows, shady lanes and stiles – these associated furnishings of the countryside compose the scene, and such compositions had an absorbing interest for James. The representative ensemble of Englishness had been familiar to him in America years before he actually came to England, familiar ‘in the way the brown hamlet disposes itself, and the gray square tower of the church, in just the right relation, peeps out of trees that remind me exactly of those which, in the frontispieces of Birket Foster, offered to my childish credulity the very essence of England’ (illus. 86). England’s scenic repertoire had reached him across the Atlantic through the literature and art of the Victorian period, and through the writings of the earlier chroniclers of English country life and scenery. James’s musings come in the course of his tour of Suffolk in English Hours (1905), specifically ‘Old Suffolk’, as he calls it. Within the very first sentence he associates it with the birthplace of David Copperfield. That associative impulse largely determines his selection of the places to be visited and reflected upon in the county. Grafting a fictional character on to a real location, and thereby giving that place its significant identity, typifies the way in which that ‘essence of England’, as he called it, had become a construction, or ‘composition’, part real place and part novelistic topography (like ‘Dickens’s London’). ‘Old Suffolk’ is the last chapter in English Hours; there, before closing his book, James feels a need to abstract that ‘essence of England’. The same purpose drives me at this late point in this book. What is, or what was, that essence of England that had emerged by the end of the nineteenth century? Where James responds to the countryside, he tends to resolve it as a repertoire of conventional rural features to be met with in 239

a sweet view one combination or another (‘in just the right relation’). We have seen most of these motifs in the course of this book, sometimes just at a glance, sometimes with a longer, loitering scrutiny. In this chapter I want to gather some of those principal elements closer together and focus them once more: village and hamlet, old pathways, country church and churchyard, fields with their hedgerows, stiles and gates. Above all, there is the cottage – typically the South Country cottage. If any single object in the repertoire of English rural motifs embodied that ‘essence’, it would have been the country cottage. Sitting quietly beneath its heavy brow of thatch and clasped by its twining creepers, the cottage was just as thickly clad with the tendrils of cultural history. So often has it functioned as an adaptable emblem of a supposedly changeless Englishness that it can be taken as a paradigm of the evolving ‘sweet view’ that has been the preoccupation of this book. The cottage and its typology will be the subject of the final chapter.

Echoing green and country churchyard Henry James’s English countryside motifs – ‘brown hamlet’, church tower, trees and hedgerows – come into view again and again in the literature and art of the nineteenth century, but with an increasing awareness by writers and artists that they are slowly passing away. The loss of rural village scenery along with the community that gave it life had been a focus for English elegy ever since Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770). The legacy of that lament is audible throughout one of its angriest nineteenth-century successors, Ebenezer Elliott’s ‘The Splendid Village’ (1833). ‘Only in a sinking land,’ Elliott writes in his preface to the poem, ‘a land of taxation without representation, of castes and corn-bills, of degradation, cant, and misery; of wretched poor, wretch-making rich . . . could such a poem as “The Splendid 240

English Rural Scenery

Village” have been written or conceived.’ The ancient village the poet used to know, ‘happy once, is splendid now’ (Elliott uses ‘splendid’ disparagingly, to mean showy prosperity), and at its heart is the memory of the vanished green: No more the shouting youngsters shall convene, To play at leap-frog on the village-green . . . The Green is gone! And barren splendours gleam, Where hiss’d the gander at the passing team, And the gay traveller from the city prais’d The poor man’s cow, and, weary, stopp’d and gaz’d.

Ideas of the ‘essence of England’ became particularly urgent, as we have seen, during the war with France, when national identity – already for some decades perceived as culturally threatened by French influence – was now under real physical threat from invasion. After the war and the immediate years of recovery came the accelerating transformation that stirred the anger of Elliott, William Cobbett and other radical observers. By the time of the First World War and then again in the Second, the traditional English village and its green were summoned to represent the nation’s very identity, distilling the spirit of the country to its essential components. Frank Newbould, whose poster work we saw in Chapter Four, produced another ‘Your britain’ image in 1942, to stir patriotic sentiment (illus. 87). The village green and its duck pond are dominated by a huge sheltering oak tree, its scale making the buildings seem like toys. The mellow, half-timbered inn sits in the sunlight beside the church tower (with its flag of St George) and its lychgated churchyard. A parade of old shops and houses, some with jettied upper storeys, runs along the far side of the green. The forms of commercial, social, ecclesiastical and natural life cluster in harmony beneath the ancient patriarchal symbol of English natural strength. Small 241

a sweet view

87 Frank Newbould, Your Britain – fight for it now 1942, poster.

groups of people are at ease beneath the tree’s shade and by the inn bench. This sweet view catches a moment of sunlit stillness. A similar village scene had been idealized for the First World War. ‘A Wish’ (illus. 88) was a poster designed by George Clausen, a late nineteenth-century painter of English rural life. It was commissioned and published by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London. The sturdy church tower dominates the scene, as so often. It stands in for the ancient presiding oak tree. Its rootedness in village life is physically figured in its buttresses and the way they correspond to tree roots bulging from the base of old trunks to grasp down into the earth. The thatched roof of the cottage leans into the churchyard, and villagers loiter and chat by the gate, their heads level with the gravestones that tilt back and forth as if in posthumous conversation. Young and old take their rest in the foreground. The scene is significantly empty of young men: just a mother and child and some elderly folk. The trees have a plumy softness and lightness, like the clouds. The whole ensemble speaks of the harmonious, tranquil integration of human and natural forms and activities. 242

88 George Clausen, A Wish, 1916, poster showing an idyllic English village scene, with a poem by Samuel Rogers.

a sweet view Copies of Clausen’s village scene were sent to the troops in France at the end of 1916 as a Christmas ‘reminder of home’ (the text above the picture), distilled in this village scene. For similar reasons of fortifying patriotic sentiment, some at the Front also carried copies of The Oxford Book of English Verse (in its slim, India paper form), edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch and published in 1900. One of the poems in that anthology was the short lyric ‘A Wish’, the full text of which runs along the base of Clausen’s poster: Mine be a cot beside the hill, A bee-hive’s hum shall soothe my ear; A willowy brook, that turns a mill, With many a fall shall linger near. The swallow, oft, beneath my thatch, Shall twitter from her clay-built nest; Oft shall the pilgrim lift the latch, And share my meal, a welcome guest. ... The village-church, among the trees, Where first our marriage-vows were giv’n, With merry peals shall swell the breeze, And point with taper spire to heav’n.

Like the poster view, these verses concentrate an idyll of social harmony. The swallow and the pilgrim are given hospitality by the happy couple in the cottage; and there, dominating the scene as in the poster, is the church. All the elements have grown together as an organic whole. That was a vital message in time of war. ‘The Wish’, however, had first been published a century and a quarter before the First World War, in 1786. Its author was Samuel Rogers, friend of William Gilpin, poet of the 244

English Rural Scenery

associationist Pleasures of Memory, and host on many occasions to the Romantic poets. ‘The Wish’ has its precursors in the long Horatian tradition in England of a poetry of rural retirement, in which stock sentiments and rural imagery combined to establish a formula of retreat to the idealized simple cottage life in a small village or more isolated site, and where the motifs of the happy village green flourished. One of the most popular poems of the early and middle eighteenth century was John Pomfret’s ‘The Choice’ (1699, with seven editions in its first two years of publication). Pomfret’s choice was for a modest house ‘on a rising Ground’, surrounded by fields and woodland, with a brook nearby, where he could settle down in retirement to a ‘frugal Plenty’ that would allow him to extend hospitality to the stranger and the neighbouring poor. From this tradition was born the idyll of the English cottage and the country village, still going strong more than two centuries later, when England needed to summon images of national identity. Three years after Rogers published his poem, William Blake issued his illuminated Songs of Innocence (1789), one of them entitled ‘The Ecchoing Green’ [sic]. It is composed of two plates, the first of which (illus. 89) features a scene on the village green, much like Birket Foster’s The Village Oak. Here is the dominating oak tree, as on Newbould’s green. Beneath its sheltering canopy and supported by its thick trunk are the mothers and babies and the old folk, watching the children at their games out in the sunlight. The green echoes the shouts and laughter of the children. It echoes their unreflecting songs of innocence as an aural covenant of the symbiosis of child and natural world. The absorption of the human into the natural world is also represented in the way the seated forms of the adults seem to become part of the root system of the great protective tree, billowing along the line of the trunk as it splays and anchors itself in the earth. 245

a sweet view

89 William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience: ‘The Ecchoing Green’, designed 1789, this version c. 1825, relief etching printed in orange-brown ink and hand-coloured with watercolour and gold.

That national symbol of security, the great oak, pushes its roots down and out into the English green. It is that clench on ancient earth that gives this tree its colossal bulk and spread, as well as the stability to enable it to protect and support those living, working and playing on the land. The sheltering myth also has 246

English Rural Scenery

90 Charles Waller Shayer, Village Cricket, in the New Forest, Brockenhurst, c. 1870–80, oil on canvas.

its roots in the historical past, and in all those poetic and pictorial precursors to Clausen’s and Newbould’s images of English scenery. Consonant with that way of thinking, the parish church, the village and its old cottages, the great oaks and ancient hedgerows surrounding it and spreading away across the fields – all these structures are made to seem part of the same quasi-organic network issuing from and ensuring the continuity of the essential character of English life. They are the guarantee that the present is rooted in the past, and that the past is alive in the present. Like other common land, village greens in England diminished or were lost altogether during the period of enclosure, thereby restricting public spaces for recreation for the villagers, their feasts and fairs, their arena for games for children and for labourers after work. The disappearance of the greens transformed the community landscape, and as emblems of close-knit village life they became more precious and romanticized in the imagination of city-dwellers sensing the atomization of community. The idealized village clustered its cottages, shops and other buildings

247

a sweet view around a green, as in Charles Shayer’s painting of a village cricket match (c. 1870–80; illus. 90), which concentrates that sense of a community focused on its ‘echoing green’. The Common Lands of England and Wales (1968) by W. G. Hoskins and Dudley Stamp published a map of the distribution of village greens in 1961. At that date the total estimated number of greens in England was 1,354. Massed dots on the map indicate the relative density of individual greens in each county. Like a swarm of bees, the dots thicken to a near-solid, dark mass in the Home Counties. Nearly a quarter of England’s village greens then were concentrated in just four counties, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Middlesex and Surrey – 305 in all. The total acreage for Surrey’s 85 greens was 31.7 (nearly 13 ha); the crude average of about a third of an acre (1,200 sq. m) per village green reinforces the sense that these surviving small community recreation spaces, cradled by the surrounding village homes, had been sedulously protected for decades if not centuries. If this map of 1961 reflects in broad terms the legacy of nineteenth-century post-enclosures England (after legislation exempted such proven community spaces from enclosure acts), it is no wonder that village greens became such tenacious emblems of the South Country English rural idyll. In the village scenes of Birket Foster, Clausen, Shayer and Newbould the church is a prominent feature presiding over the human community. Blake’s plates have no sign of a church; he might have felt his echoing greens contaminated by a church or any similar institutional reminder of the repressive presence of priesthood. However, his prejudice did not extend to his disciple Samuel Palmer, whose Shoreham idylls often drew in the church tower or spire, reaching up and away from village and working world below (illus. 91). Constable also, in his Stour valley scenes, frequently accommodated the motif, breaking his horizon lines with Dedham’s distinctive church tower. The church tower or 248

English Rural Scenery 91 Samuel Palmer, Cornfield and Church by Moonlight, early 1830s, brush and black ink on paper.

spire in these evocations of English landscape soared up to lift the spirit of the working community and also as a counterpoint to the dead buried below. It stood as a constant reassurance: ‘the old tower of the village church that has looked down upon generation after generation of the inhabitants seems to say, “Je suis, je reste. All things change but I.”’ So wrote Ditchfield in 1908 (perhaps the tower had meant to say ‘j’y suis, j’y reste’?). The country church with its churchyard was a vital component of the English rural idyll for the Victorians. It was a talismanic image of old-fashioned, simple faith in a time of proliferating religious doubt and schism, and (like the village green) a focus for a sense of community in a time of social fragmentation in the great cities. It featured as such in a wide variety of popular literary and artistic publications, including George Cruikshank’s sequence of plates The Bottle of 1847 (illus. 92, 93), which warned of the evils of drink for the urban poor. The Bottle spread its graphic message widely: more than 100,000 copies sold in the first few days after its 249

English Rural Scenery

publication. The first plate shows the happy family in their town house, enjoying ‘just a drop’ of wine. In the centre of the composition, presiding over their contentment, is the image of a country church (perhaps a record of their own recent background), positioned so as to ensure the family observes the old-fashioned values. By Plate iii, when drink has taken hold of the family and their goods are distrained, the country church (and family Bible on the table) are lost to the household, and the wife eyes the old picture remorsefully. The country church and its churchyard as intimate features of village life served also to remind the living that the dead beneath the lichen-encrusted tombstones belonged to their village and remain there a part of it, at rest in its earth. The churchyard is an image that venerates loss and yet also commemorates posthumous continuity of presence within the community. Any assurance of continuity becomes a key function of the Victorian rural idyll for a rapidly modernizing and urbanized people. William Howitt underlined this when he drew attention to the grim contrast between town and country funerals. In the city ‘a strange corpse passes along, amid thousands of strangers’; see, for instance, the dark hearse struggling to make its way through the crowds in Gustave Doré’s ‘Ludgate’ picture (see illus. 46). In the country, however,

92, 93 George Cruikshank, The Bottle, 1847, plates i and iii.

every man, woman, and child goes down to the dust amid those who have known them from their youth, and all miss them from their place. Nature seems in its silence to sym­ pathise with the mourners. The green mound of the rural churchyard opens to receive the slumberer to a peaceful resting-place, and the yews or lindens which he climbed when a boy . . . overshadow, as it were, with a kindred feeling his grave.

251

a sweet view

Here, among the slanting gravestones, was a place to pause and reflect, as in Constable’s watercolour sketch of 1833 (illus. 94). He designed this as an illustration to an edition in 1834 of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, the most enduringly famous expression of churchyard sentiment. Its distinctive cadences were still echoing more than a century after its first publication in 1751; it was ‘the typical piece of English verse, our poem of poems’, claimed Edmund Gosse in 1882. By 1915 some 244 separate editions had been published. Constable was just one artist commissioned to illustrate this edition of the Elegy (others included George Cattermole, Copley Fielding and George Barrett the younger). An edition was published in America in 1854, with illustrations by Birket Foster and others; and other special ‘Artists’’ editions appeared in the 1880s. This testifies to the Victorian demand for Gray’s country churchyard with its sumptuous rural imagery and calming moral sentiments conveyed in 252

94 John Constable, ‘Design for Thomas Gray’s Elegy, Stanza 5’, 1833, watercolour.

English Rural Scenery

sonorous, soothing cadences, to harmonize with the quiet spirit of Old England. Rural churchyards provided a setting where fellow humans had at last become one with nature, dissolving back into its primary materials and posthumously helping to shape the local landscape – ‘where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap’. The soothing swell and dip of the tussocky ground is audible in Gray’s undulating vowels. In the illustrated page from one of

95 Arthur Hayman, after William T. Richards, ‘Beneath that Yew-tree’s Shade’, illustration from Thomas Gray, An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: The Artists’ Edition (1893).

253

a sweet view

these Artists’ editions (illus. 95), those words lie embedded in the churchyard ground, lapped by its encroaching grasses. Country churchyards conformed to Jane Austen’s ‘sweet view’ requirements, generous in their provision of ‘verdure’, ‘culture’ and ‘comfort’ – spiritual comfort, particularly. Much of the melancholy solace described above is concentrated in one of the most beautifully rendered churchyard scenes, Arthur Hughes’s Home from Sea (1862; illus. 96; supposedly based on All Saints church, Chingford). In the shaded foreground the home-returning sailor boy weeps over his mother’s grave, a narrative partially echoed in the background, where a mother ewe is separated from her lamb by a tombstone. The human event is thus assimilated to pastoral, and 254

96 Arthur Hughes, Home from Sea, 1862, oil on panel.

English Rural Scenery

beyond that reconciled with nature and time. The mild spring sunshine plays over the broken surfaces of stone and plaster, over brick and roof tile, and over the lichened gravestones swaying in the sea of grass. It irradiates the cascading ivy. A calming natural and naturalized beauty is set against, and palliates, a drama of loss and mutability. In miniature, this is a type of the broader solace that the English countryside came to stand for in the nineteenth century. The boy from overseas has come ‘Home’.

Footpaths to Old England: Lanes, stiles and gates A National Footpaths Preservation Society was founded in 1884 and activated campaigns throughout the country. It is a measure of the importance for the urbanized Victorians of their memories of old country lanes and field paths, grassy thoroughfares into a green world. A Manchester Footpath Preservation Association had been founded as early as 1826. In 1843 the social reformer

97 Helen Allingham, Night-jar Lane, Witley, 1887, watercolour.

255

a sweet view Edwin Chadwick complained of ‘the mischief of the stoppage of footpaths and ancient walks’, which, he suggested (along with the enclosure of recreational common land), would ‘drive the labouring classes to the public-house’. Octavia Hill, a key figure in this and other conservation movements (and a co-founder of the National Trust), was eloquent about the value of these old rights of way: One of the great common inheritances to which . . . English citizens are born – the footpaths of their native country . . . These little winding ways, that lead us on by the hedgerows and over brooks, through scented meadows and up grassy hill, away from dirty road, and into the silent green of wood and field, are a common possession. These footpaths were formed centuries ago as functional pathways for those living and working in country villages and hamlets. Victorian England now had better-surfaced and efficiently planned new roads, and hundreds of them, to meet society’s practical destination needs. The old footpaths and lanes were increasingly obsolete byways to the network of new highways. Sensitive to the landscape, they meandered and curled, crossed fords and stiles, threaded holloways (illus. 97) and slowed the pace, unlike the great stretches of straight, paved roads being driven through the country, not to mention the proliferation of railways. Thus the field paths and tree-shaded lanes were treasured increasingly as conduits into the fragrant other-world of Old England. They were to be preserved, by campaign if necessary, for the rusticating flâneur. William Howitt’s Book of the Seasons (1831) was recommended as a solace for the winter season as well as a resource for imaginatively recovering those precious old pathways. To reinforce this, his reviewer in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal lavished copious 256

English Rural Scenery

quotation on his readership, including Howitt’s rhapsody about stiles and footpaths (briefly excerpted earlier). I am happy to do the same here for my reader, especially if he or she, like Leslie Stephen, enjoys the countryside best in books. The prose moves slowly as it absorbs so much rich detail into its loitering narrative amble, and it is an ideal illustration of how the country idyll counteracts the high-pressure ‘speed’ that epitomized the Victorian era. This is from Howitt’s ‘July’ section: I love our real old English foot paths. I love those rustic and picturesque stiles opening their pleasant escapes from frequented places and dusty highways into the solitudes of nature. It is delightful to catch a glimpse of one on the old villagegreen; under the old elder-tree by some ancient cottage, or half hidden by the overhanging boughs of a wood . . . It seems to invite one from noise and publicity into the heart of solitude, and of rural delight. It beckons the imagination on through green and whispering corn-fields, through the short but verdant pasture; the flowering mowing-grass; the odorous and sunny hay-field; the festivity of harvest; from lonely farm to farm, from village to village; by clear and mossy wells; by tinkling brooks and deep wood-skirted streams, to crofts where the daffodil is rejoicing in spring, or meadows where the large blue geranium embellishes the summer wayside; to heaths with their warm elastic sward and crimson bells – the chittering of grasshoppers, – the foxglove, and the gnarled oak . . . What is there so truly English? What is so truly linked with our rural tastes, our sweetest memories, and our sweetest poetry, as stiles and foot paths? Goldsmith, Thomson, and Milton, have adorned them with some of their richest wreaths . . . It is along the foot-path in secluded fields, upon the stile in the embowered lane, where the wild rose and the honey-suckle are lavishing their beauty and their fragrance, that we delight 257

a sweet view to picture to ourselves rural lovers breathing, in the dewy sweetness of summer evening, vows still sweeter. Grieving over the disappearance from the countryside of these features as a result of ‘the advance of wealth and population’, Howitt observed that ‘As land has increased in value, wastes and heaths have been parceled out and inclosed, but seldom have footpaths been left.’ The Chambers’s reviewer, having quoted Howitt at length, then reinforced the elegiac note: ‘What a pity it is that the advance of wealth and avarice is fast closing up these good old-fashioned footpaths and stiles, and driving both the rural and the town population into the dusty and prosaic highways!’ This gave added encouragement to retreat into Birket Foster’s ‘Green Lane’ (see illus. 76). Over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, landscape artists of the English scene revelled in gates, stiles and fences that had worn away to dilapidated gestures or simply run into the ground, having shrugged off their boundary responsibilities and opened up the countryside to all. Gainsborough made a speciality of this. His landscapes often include a decoratively useless straggle of post-and-rail that seems to have given up the effort of fencing off anything. Just as functionally pointless are the decrepit fragment of fencing in the foreground of Constable’s The Cornfield (1826) and the five-barred gate into the cornfield, which has broken from its hinges (illus. 98, 99). Partially collapsed and roughly patched-up gates, stiles and fences (illus. 100–102) were obviously delicious exercises in picturesque ruggedness for the artist, and sometimes extended to near-abstract patterns of line and colour (as in Cotman’s Drop Gate). But they also say something about a fondness for the benign carelessness of property divisions in the countryside, especially at a time of widespread enclosures and some ferocious penalization of trespassing and poaching. Like ruined abbeys and castles, they also tell of the 258

98, 99 Details of John Constable, ‘Landscape’ (The Cornfield), 1826.

English Rural Scenery 102 John Sell Cotman, Drop Gate, Duncombe Park, 1806, watercolour over graphite.

left: 100 Thomas Gainsborough, Study of an Old Hurdle, 1755–9, graphite on paper. 101 William Bree, A Much-repaired Gate, 1804, watercolour on paper.

triumph of time over rigid line and measure, as their weathered and warped uprights and horizontals crumple into a tangle of eccentric diagonals and curves. Gertrude Jekyll’s memories in Old West Surrey made clear her love of old wooden post-and-rail fences: ‘It is the true fence of the country, and a thing of actual beauty in the free play of line of the rails and the slight inequality 261

a sweet view 103 John Middleton, Alby, Norfolk, 1847, watercolour on paper.

of the posts.’ A diorama from 1851, Our Native Land, exhibited at the Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street, London, included a congenially decrepit stretch of countryside fencing. A visitor to the show remarked, ‘You then peep over the broken fence which is mended with picturesque looking rails – such as only a countryman could put together.’ Time is one kind of predator on Old England, and the Victorian conservationist movements tried to salvage what they could and ‘restore’ what was already lost, incurring the antagonism of those such as William Morris and John Ruskin, who, as we have seen, deplored the radical restoration of ancient buildings. But the image-makers of country scenery, such as the painters Myles Birket Foster and Helen Allingham and the photographer Henry Peach Robinson, were playing their part in conserving records of old rural England at the same time as idealizing that fading world. They revelled in old fences, hedges and stiles. Robinson even reconstructed them in his photographic studio (illus. 104). Another type of predator was identified with the enclosures commissioners, whose work from the mid-eighteenth to the 262

English Rural Scenery

104 Henry Peach Robinson and Nelson King Cherrill, A Gleaner, 1872, albumen print.

mid-nineteenth centuries had such a devastating effect on John Clare: ‘Enclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain,’ he wrote in ‘Remembrances’ (c. 1832). His anti-enclosure poems (such as ‘The Mores’) are well known as angry laments for the appropriation and parcelling up of common land with new fences and gates and warning signs to trespassers. But the effects can be felt indirectly, although no less passionately, elsewhere in his work, where enclosure is not the ostensible subject. One example 263

a sweet view is his sonnet ‘Wood Pictures in Spring’ (a poem of the 1820s or early 1830s). It epitomizes his affection for gates and fences that have surrendered their disciplinary roles and now seem to be melting back into the natural landscape, fondled by the warm spring sunshine. The poet wishes he had the painter’s skill to render the woodland scene, with its ‘brown luxuriance of unfolding hues’. Here is the sestet: And this old gate that claps against the tree The entrance of spring’s paradise should be – Yet paint itself with living nature fails: The sunshine threading through these broken rails In mellow shades no pencil e’er conveys, And mind alone feels fancies and portrays.

Extraordinary beauty can radiate from the simplest objects. This insight is reminiscent of Wordsworth’s assertion (in the ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse) that we should discard the mythical ‘Paradise and groves/ Elysian’ of antiquity as sanctuaries of natural beauty because we can create Elysian beauty in the ‘simple produce of the common day’, in a vernacularization of the landscape idyll. An old gate with its rails wreathed in sunlight is no longer a barrier but a portal to paradise. These hymns in words and paint to the humblest of objects – the village green, the country churchyard, the field paths, stiles and gates – are energized by the sentiment of local attachment, which we touched on in Chapter One. The ‘very essence of England’ is constructed out of this motley rural furniture. Icons of Old England are dragged into prominence – highlighted within the new picture frame – by the picturesque aesthetic’s relish of neglect and obsolescence in the weathered forms of old cottages, derelict mills, broken gates, rustic people and the most humdrum of countryside landmarks – that old stile, just there . . . half-buried 264

English Rural Scenery

in the hawthorn hedge . . . Such mundane objects are more than formalist feasts for the picturesque artist. They are sanctified by emotional attachment because they represent a continuity with the distant past and a fading culture. On 29 September 1824 Clare took a walk into the country, and ‘saw an old wood stile taken away from a favourite spot which it had occupied all my life the posts were overgrown with Ivy & it seemd so akin to nature & the spot where it stood as tho it had taken it on lease for an undisturbd existance it hurt me to see it was gone for my affections claims a friendship with such things but nothing is lasting in this world.’

‘Without hedges England would not be England’ The mention of ‘motley’ above brings me to that very distinctive feature of English countryside, the ancient, overgrown hedgerow. The greatest single small-compass concentration of flora and fauna in the English countryside was the mature hedgerow. ‘Perfect mines of beauty’, Richard Jefferies called them, and ‘so typical of an English landscape’. Old hedgerows are a high-density tangle of design and accident, cultivation and the wild. Many originated as field boundaries in the form of stone walls or fences or plashed barriers. Then, left to decay, they provided a harbour for random saplings, shrubs and grasses to flourish and thus little by little became natural replacements for the artificial boundaries. Others came into being as – in Oliver Rackham’s words – ‘the “ghosts” of woods that have been grubbed out leaving their edges as field boundaries’. Hedges are both functional and decorative. A Scottish visitor to England in 1818 was struck by their extravagant beauty: ‘Every field in England is defended by a hedge of great and unshorn luxuriance, and the number of wild flowers with which, in summer, every hedge is adorned, must furnish the finest of all contrasts to the bleakness and poverty of our modern bye-paths.’ Frederick Law 265

a sweet view Olmsted made a similar observation during his visit to England in the 1850s: hedges, English hedges, hawthorn hedges, all in blossom . . . with delicious fragrance, on each side of us, and on, as far as we can see, true farm-fencing hedges; nothing trim, stiff, nice, and amateur-like, but the verdure broken, tufty, low, and natural . . . set on a ridge of earth thrown out from a ditch beside them, which raises and strengthens them as a fence . . . nearly all hawthorn, which is now covered in patches, as if after a slight fall of snow, with clusters of white or pink blossoms over its light green foliage. ‘Broken, tufty . . . natural’: the unruly, wild beauty of the hedge was not inconsistent with its regulatory role in country life. By the beginning of the era of parliamentary enclosures in the middle of the eighteenth century, large parts of England had already been enclosed. But that earlier phase of enclosure had not been systematic, nor had it impressed rectilinear grids on the new property divisions to the extent that the parliamentary acts authorized. Thus older enclosed England kept its curvilinear boundary markers, the hedgerows and stone walls snaking across the hills and valley pasturelands. The new generation of hedgerows and the patchwork of small rectangular fields that now constitute such a distinctive feature of English landscape were to a great extent the creation of this second wave of enclosures. Between 1750 and 1850, as we have seen, about 322,000 kilometres (200,000 mi.) of hedgerows were established. Much of this new hedging was set with hawthorn only (‘hawthorn’ derives from ‘hedge-thorn’). Hedging planted before the mid-eighteenth century developed a greater variety of plant life, as well as of contour. By the 1960s some 990,000 kilometres (616,000 mi.) of hedgerows enclosed 80 per cent of England’s agricultural land. 266

English Rural Scenery

By 1870 one-sixth of the area of England had been enclosed by act of Parliament. That transformation of the land – in all its geometrical hardness – had been concentrated in central England, in the east and south Midlands, and northwards into Lincolnshire and east Yorkshire. Surrey, Kent and Sussex, Essex and Suffolk on the east were little touched by Parliamentary enclosures. As we saw in Chapter Five, Rackham termed these counties ‘Ancient Countryside’ (as contrasted with the ‘Planned Countryside’ resulting from the transformations of enclosure). Ancient counties are characterized by hamlets and small towns, ancient, isolated farms, winding roads and many footpaths, and mixed, irregularly contoured hedges. The opulently picturesque old hedgerows in Surrey and Sussex that Jefferies studied and that Foster and Allingham painted had, by and large, originated as private constructions, responding to local convenience. But by Jefferies’s time, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, even the ‘Planned’ hedgerows had matured and botanically diversified into treasure chests for the naturalist and the watercolourist. Such was the density and complexity of these nurseries for wild flowers and creepers, and habitats for birds and rodents, that hedge-appreciation necessitated some training of the mind and eye – indeed, of all the senses – in order to identify and absorb their full opulence. Walter Besant was willing to learn hedge lore from Jefferies, but his mind and eye had become so habituated to the cityscape (as we remarked in Chapter Six) that his assiduous studies went for nothing: Nay, after reading all the books and all the papers – every one – that Jefferies wrote between the years 1876 and 1887, after learning from him all that he had to teach, I cannot yet see these things. I see a hedge; I see wild rose, honeysuckle, black briony – herbe aux femmes battues, the French poetically call it – blackberry, hawthorn, and elder. I see on the 267

a sweet view banks sweet wildflowers whose name I learn from year to year, and straightway forget because they grow not in the streets. Field hedges were a feast for the botanist, and came to stand for something quintessentially English – ‘the very synonym of Merry England’, as Jefferies called them: ‘Hedges, thick and high, and full of flowers, birds, and living creatures, of shade and flecks of sunshine dancing up and down the bark of the trees’. They needed protection, as George Shadbolt’s photograph of a threadbare Hornsey hedge with its ageing oaks shows (illus. 105). Mature, tall hedge trees such as those in the Hornsey hedge were not liked by some arable farmers, since they cast too much shadow over their growing crops, whereas dairy farmers were more likely to preserve them, according to Jefferies: The meadow-farmers, dairymen, have not grubbed many hedges – only a few, to enlarge the field, too small before, by throwing two into one. So that hawthorn and blackthorn, ash and willow, with their varied hues of green in spring, briar and bramble, with blackberries and hips later on, are still there as in the old, old time. Bluebells, violets, cowslips – the same old favourite flowers – may be found on the mounds or sheltered nearby. The meadow-farmers have dealt mercifully with the hedges, because they know that for shade in heat and shelter in storm the cattle resort to them. The arable farmers might construct or modify hedges differently, for instance to minimize pest presences for their crops. Jefferies instanced the thin wheat-field hedges of woven hawthorn branches, translucent, ‘like screens of twisted stone in ancient chapels’. If the hedge is left untended over time, convolvulus climbs over it, and corncockle, St John’s wort and a host of 268

English Rural Scenery 105 George Shadbolt, Mt Pleasant Fields, Hornsey, 1860s, albumen print.

flowering weeds crowd its base. As a spectacle this afforded ‘far more than anyone could put into a picture, or . . . into a book; for the painter can but give one aspect of one day, and the writer a mere catalogue of things’, whereas nature ‘refreshes the reality every day . . . it is never twice the same’. The high hedges panelling the fields evolved into wildlife in the English landscape. ‘Without hedges England would not be England,’ Jefferies insisted: ‘Let not the modern Goths destroy our hedges, so full of all that can delight the eye and please the mind.’ In George Cruikshank’s cartoon ‘London Going out of Town’ (illus. 106), the developer responsible for the ranks of new terraces invading the countryside is a ‘Mr Goth’. What is it, then, that seemed so English about these hedges? Jefferies doesn’t really develop that remark. Perhaps it was the combination of natural, spontaneous beauty with functional utility, that old English compromise, a controlled wildness. Perhaps the hedge embodied in its loosely knit but containable natural cornucopia just that balance or 269

a sweet view tension that we have come across elsewhere in nineteenthcentury discussions of English rural scenery, and which seems to be a key to Victorian constructions of their rural idyll. The mature hedgerow was both an ecological and an aesthetic amenity in the English countryside, and a feature particularly attractive for Jefferies’s mission. ‘You do not know how much there is in the

106 George Cruikshank, London Going out of Town; or, The March of Bricks and Mortar!, 1829, handcoloured etching. 107 Myles Birket Foster, Gathering Lilac, n.d., watercolour.

270

English Rural Scenery 108 Helen Allingham, On the Pilgrims’ Way, 1902, watercolour.

hedges,’ he tells his readership, and to artists he declared, ‘It is from the hedges that taste must be learned.’ The mid- and late Victorian years were the heyday of hedge painting: Foster’s scenes of women and children stretching into brimming roadside hedges to gather lilacs or blackberries (illus. 107), and Allingham’s towering hedgerows by the cottage gate or field borders. But such pretty hedges were not detailed in the way that Jefferies was asking for. The popular hedge paintings of Foster and Allingham usually feature as extensions of their 271

a sweet view cottage furniture or outgrowths of their little wild-flower gardens, and were rendered as attractively tousled ‘soft landscaping’. Now and again, though, the hedge became the principal motif, as in Allingham’s On the Pilgrim’s Way (1902, illus. 108), which was reproduced in Marcus Huish’s Happy England as Painted by Helen Allingham, r.w.s. of 1903 (a tribute to the artist). Huish remarked that hardly any artists other than Allingham would have made this their main subject. Instead, they would have crossed the stile to set up their easels in front of ‘the shorn field and stacked sheaves, breaking their monotony of form and colour by the waggon and its attendant labourers’, preferring a conventional harvest scene. But, according to Huish, it was the ‘harvest of the hedge’ that delighted Allingham in this particular watercolour, according to Huish: ‘In May the hedge was white with hawthorn, in June gay with dog-roses and white briar, in July with convolvuli and woodbine, and now again in August comes the clematis and the blackberry flower.’ This preference not to engage the hedge as a richly English subject sufficient in itself troubled Jefferies, too. He thought he knew why the writer and the artist shied away from it: ‘one might begin to write a book about a hedgerow when a boy and find it incomplete in old age.’ For the artist there was ‘far more than anyone could put into a picture . . . work enough in that short piece of hedge . . . for a good pencil every day the whole summer. And when done, you would not have been satisfied with it, but only have learned how complex and how thoughtful and far reaching Nature is in the simplest of things.’ One day Jefferies came across an artist seated at his easel in a corner of a field, beside some hedges that contained oak trees and a great variety of plants: The hedge was singularly full of ‘bits’ – bryony, tangles of grasses, berries, boughs half-tinted and boughs green, hung 272

English Rural Scenery

as it were with pictures like the wall of a room. Standing as near as I could without disturbing him, I found that the subject of his canvas was none of these. It was that old stale and dull device of a rustic bridge spanning a shallow stream crossing a lane. Some figure stood on the bridge – the old, old trick. He was filling up the hedge of the lane with trees from the hedge, and they were cleverly executed. But why drag them into this fusty scheme, which has appeared in every child’s sketch-book for fifty years? Why not have simply painted the beautiful hedge at hand, purely and simply, a hedge hung with pictures for anyone to copy. The stale pictorial formula, exemplified in Thomas Creswick’s Landscape (illus. 109), wins over the vibrant hedgeful of ‘pictures’, all those bright ‘bits’ arrayed for their portraits, with no one to paint them. Jefferies is exasperated. There is one contemporary artist who might have won Jefferies’s good opinion of his hedge-painting, and that was his

109 Thomas Creswick, Landscape with Stream, Bridge and Cottage, n.d., oil on panel.

273

a sweet view

acquaintance John William North. In a watercolour of 1885, ‘The Bat Begins with Giddy Wing . . .’ (illus. 110), North confronts the bewitching complexity of that classic English natural miscellany, the hedgerow. As with Huish’s remarks on Allingham, the artist might have chosen the barley field beyond as his main subject, with the hedge a minor component along with the thatched building and elegant trees. But he has instead used the hedge almost to fence off the conventional motif. He presents a scene empty of narrative, a path with no one on it. The title quotation about 274

110 John William North, ‘The Bat Begins with Giddy Wing’ – Barley Field over the Hedge, 1885, watercolour and pencil with scratching out.

English Rural Scenery

the bat on the wing belies the stillness in the scene. The path doesn’t lead into the picture (as it does in countless Allingham cottage scenes); it just passes across it. The field beyond is simply a pale yellow band, a flat screen to throw the hedge into sharper and more energetic relief. Beyond the field the partial shapes of buildings and trees never emerge far enough to distract from the remarkable foreground. North hardly begins to detail the hedge botanically, as a PreRaphaelite painter might have done. That is evidently not his interest. The only clearly identifiable plant is the foreground thistle, its head positioned brightly against the deep brown of the ivied stump buried in the hedge. Further to the left, a rabbit sits before a dark recess. A young ash shoulders its way above the thicket. All else in this dense hedgerow is suggestion only. Massed leaves are dabbed in, pointillist-wise; elsewhere the hedge’s materials are melted together. A playful freedom dominates the scene. We are meant to be looking at something that is always running wild and yet serving its function, not so much a single object as a largely accidental aggregate of individual things that we name as a single entity, ‘hedge’. Perhaps that is a microcosm of the way in which that elusive ‘essence’ of English scenery is constituted? In these respects – its reconciliation of its social and economic function with its freedom to burgeon naturally – the hedgerow has an affinity with the country cottage; the hedgerow is a gradually naturalizing human structure, a partially planned miscellaneity, flourishing in a socialized natural environment. The cottage – constructed for human use with a range of materials from the local natural environment, and hosting both its human occupants and the non-human natural world of plants and wildlife – is the subject of the next chapter.

275

eight

The Country Cottage

T

111 Thomas Gainsborough, The Woodcutter’s Return, c. 1780, oil on canvas.

he country cottage is one of the most potent picturesque motifs in the ‘sweet view’ of the idealized Victorian landscape. It is also, as its value and meaning evolve over this period, a paradigm of the ways in which the perceived personality of English scenery more generally adapted itself to cultural change. From Gainsborough’s cottage-door paintings in the 1780s (popularized in prints throughout the nineteenth century), through the ruined-cottage motifs in Romantic poetry and sketching manuals, to Allingham’s demure Surrey cottage scenery in the 1880s and 1890s, the English cottage has been the emblem of secluded, tranquil living, close to nature and modest in expectations. Why and how it came to prominence as an icon of Englishness – the ‘essence of the old English country life’ (as one of Allingham’s contemporary eulogists put it) – is the subject of this final chapter; the cottage’s story in many respects recapitulates the broader evolutionary story of the English rural idyll explored in this book. The traditional English cottage represented in its material architectural form the local resources that came to hand most abundantly in the different regions of the country. Typically, it did not import its materials or its designs. Whatever form its construction took – from the tree-propped hovel to the small cruck building with wattle-and-daub wall, from cob-and-thatch structures to 277

a sweet view stone walls and slate roofing – the strongly local provenance of the cottage’s material constitution made it an indigenous icon of Englishness. As a cultural construction, the cottage grew into a complex weave of sentimentalized myth, idealized pastoral frugality, nationalistic history, heroized Englishness. ‘To understand a nation you must go to the cottager,’ insisted Richard Jefferies. As a picturesque motif, its weathered, rough-hewn character and constantly varying surface texture and colouring were highly valued. Like many of the other staple features of the ‘essence of England’ (for instance, those footpaths that became the focus of a preservation campaign), the cottage came to sentimental prominence when it began to disappear from the landscape, leaving its ruins for elegiac contemplation.

The decline and fall of the English cottage The Morning Chronicle reported in March 1796 that in 1777 the number of cottages in England and Wales was 251,261. Just under a century earlier it had been 554,631. With an average of five inhabitants per cottage, this represented a decrease in the rural labouring population of about 1.5 million. By the time the article was published, it was assumed that that number had been reduced still further, by land enclosure, the drift towards the towns and factory work, and casualties from the American war and the current war with France. These uncorroborated statistics are startling, and it is not clear from the Chronicle’s piece quite what would have constituted a dwelling as a cottage. But the citing of enclosure as contributing to the cottage’s decline is backed up in several contemporary sources, of which the following (from 1795) is typical: ‘since those small parcels of ground have been swallowed up in the contiguous farms and inclosures, and the cottages themselves have been pulled down; the families which used to occupy them are crouded together in decayed farm-houses, with hardly 278

The Country Cottage

ground enough about them for a cabbage garden: and being thus reduced to be mere hirelings, they are of course very liable to come to want.’ The Chronicle’s survey reinforced this widespread belief in rural depopulation, a development memorably deplored in Gold­ smith’s The Deserted Village (1770). This poem, which went through at least seven editions in its first two years, chronicled the destruction of an ancient village by a landowner and the consequent emptying of the countryside and loss of traditional peasant communities. Towards the end of the poem, the evicted peasantry – seen as the true strength of England – trail down to the shore towards the ships waiting to take them overseas to start new lives. The scene is represented in Thomas Bewick’s woodcut illustration of 1795 (illus. 112), in which the skeletal ruins of the abandoned village houses are overlooked by the landowner’s Palladian mansion. With an echo of Goldsmith’s lines, Bewick himself in the 1820s paid tribute to the peasant community he remembered from his childhood – those, he wrote, ‘who might truly be called “a bold Pesantry, their Country’s Pride” . . . These cottagers (at least those of them I knew) were of an honest & independent character.’ Goldsmith’s account of the decay of country life and decline of England’s peasant population fed sentimental literature and painting for many subsequent decades (Ebenezer Elliott’s ‘The Splendid Village’ of 1833 was mentioned in the previous chapter).

112 Thomas Bewick, ‘The Deserted Village’, wood engraving for Poems by Goldsmith and Parnell (1795).

279

a sweet view The history was more complicated. The rural population in England and Wales actually increased in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (from around 6 million in the 1780s to 8 million by 1831). It was the displacement caused by over a thousand separate acts of enclosure in the later eighteenth century, rather than depopulation in the countryside, that would have produced the drastic reduction in the number of cottages, converting settled communities of rural workers into migrant labourers. At the turn of the century the English landscape must have been littered with the remains of abandoned cottages from uprooted communities, ruins that became scarcely distinguishable from the colonizing undergrowth. These relics were iconized as the poignant emblems of an economy and a supposedly organic culture that had slipped into the past, or rather been pushed into extinction by aggressive enclosure and the mechanization of agricultural work. The cottage became a focus for state-of-the-nation reflections in literature and art as well as in political life. Its role was to be both a moral emblem of the national character and a favourite subject for the professional artist and amateur sketcher. We will look at the former role first. In the mid-1790s two blank-verse poems appeared with identical titles, ‘The Ruined Cottage’. One was by the young Wordsworth, who subsequently incorporated it into Book i of The Excursion. The other was by Robert Southey, included as one of his ‘English Eclogues’. Southey’s poem opens with a challenge to conventional ruin-spectacle tourism: I have seen Many an old convent reverend in decay, And many a time have trod the castle courts And grass-green halls, yet never did they strike Home to the heart such melancholy thoughts As this poor cottage.

280

The Country Cottage

113 Title page to T. C. Rickman, The Fallen Cottage (1787), with an engraving by Burnet Reading, after a drawing by James Lambert.

The cottage now supersedes those stock motifs for melancholy reflections on mutability and decay, the ruined castles and abbeys. These poems were written in time of war (with France) and potential invasion of Britain, and perhaps that is why it is the cottage rather than the grander monuments in the landscape that commands attention as the most heartfelt emblem of the nation. Wordsworth and Southey knew each other, and both were friends of Coleridge, who also contributed to the veneration of the cottage with his poem ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ (1796). Cottage life in this poem, as in Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude’ (1798), represented home in a ‘Valley of Seclusion’. It is the focus for the ‘sweet view’ (like Austen’s, ‘sweet to the eye and mind’) enjoyed by a ‘wealthy son of commerce’ who saunters by, gazes at the cottage, sighs with pleasure and calls it a ‘Blessed Place’. The poet recognizes it as a refuge from political turmoil, but his conscience is now beginning to respond to the call of engagement with the outer world. The company in which these young Romantics moved touched the more radical circles in London, which included Thomas Clio Rickman, the close friend and biographer of Thomas Paine. In 1787 Rickman had published The Fallen Cottage (illus. 113), a long poem that took up the familiar sentimentalized motif and turned it into a vigorous critique of contemporary England, a successor to Goldsmith’s Deserted Village. The fallen cottage in the title-page picture is not bidding for picturesque status, romantically softened by vegetation and slow decay. It is represented as a stark half-skeleton of a once sturdy little home. Rickman’s poem gathers many of 281

a sweet view the motifs that by this time had become associated with cottage culture: ancient habits of simple hospitality, a natural sincerity, instinctive patriotic valour, disdain for Luxury. He identifies cottage life with the ‘naked truth and plain sincerity’ of past ages, ‘Ere gross luxury,/ Foul sorceress, and with her bloated pride/ Had drawn weak man from happiest innocence’ (56–8). The patriarchal cottager is constructed as a type of ideal Englishness, with his rough integrity and spontaneous hospitality. He both protects the nation from her foreign enemies with his natural courage, fortified by the tradition of ‘manly freedom’, and sustains the nation with the fruits of his own hard work on the land. However, this cottage is now itself a ruin, an emblematic monument to the destruction of ancient virtue. It is a victim of the Luxury that is enriching and enervating the prosperous, and impoverishing and alienating the older culture. Rickman’s comparison of the ruined cottage with Rome’s decline and fall elevates

282

114 Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, Coalbrookdale by Night, 1801, oil on canvas.

The Country Cottage

a humble genre of poetry and associates it with the grander monitory texts: Nor ever let her [Britain’s] empire’s fall become The theme of Bards, as oft’ of Rome they sing, Now waste and ruinous, by mining arts Of riot and excess, subdued and sunk. (227–30)

The title The Fallen Cottage invited comparison with Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and echoed such poems as John Dyer’s The Ruins of Rome (1740). The poem itself looks backwards and forwards. It has distinct echoes of Gray’s Elegy, both in its softened focus on the humble poor and, here and there, in its phrases and cadences. But it also has a radical energy and reformist pressure, directed at ‘the pamper’d sons of elegance and ease’. Such is the new emblematic role for the English cottage. It must withstand invasion of all kinds, moral and physical. Its long-incubated natural immunity to Luxury and effeminacy is now endangered, and so, consequently, is the nation it represents in microcosm. There were other internal threats to the older cottage culture. Revolutions in manufacturing were affecting traditional rural labour. ‘Cottage industry’ was being superseded by the Industrial Revolution’s mechanization on a vast scale. Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Coalbrookdale by Night (illus. 114) shows the new industrial power as an explosive inferno. The old cottages on the left are lit by the glare, and their cottagers (who presumably now help to service the new master) can only gaze in awe as the old culture passes into the shadows. The cottage functioned as an emblem for a fading peasant culture. Its vernacular status gave it particular appeal in this period, when a de-classicizing was under way in favour of native English cultural forms. ‘No decoration should we introduce,/ That has not first been naturalized by use,’ declared Richard Payne 283

a sweet view Knight in his poem The Landscape (1795). He recommended that the landowner or garden designer cherish any ‘retired and antiquated cot’ that he happened to have on his estate: Its roof with weeds and mosses cover’d o’er, And honeysuckles climbing round the door, While mantling vines along its walls are spread, And clustering ivy decks the chimney’s head.

Thomas Hearne, who illustrated The Landscape and who made several watercolours of the views on Knight’s estate, Downton in Herefordshire, also portrayed cottage scenery in the 1790s, and shared Knight’s taste for overgrown vegetation (illus. 115). It was Gainsborough who had led the way to sentimental veneration of the sweetly crude cottage idyll. He produced images of the rural cottage throughout his career, notably in Going to Market (1768– 71), The Woodcutter’s Return (1773; illus. 116) and those later, unsettling ‘cottage door’ paintings. The Woodcutter’s Return shows a forest cottage seemingly supported by a mature oak tree. The symbolism of that support would have been familiar to Gainsborough’s contemporaries, analogous as it is with those village-green depictions of the village oak sheltering the local folk of all ages. By the doorway a large, robust family enjoy the evening glow as they welcome the father home. Gainsborough apparently referred to the painting as a ‘Cottage & ragged family’, although the women and children don’t look particularly unkempt. His description 284

115 Thomas Hearne, A Vine-clad Cottage, mid-1790s, watercolour on paper.

The Country Cottage

raises questions about his intentions here, and indeed the painting has provoked a variety of interpretations over the last half century as to whether the artist is both promoting and undermining the cottage idyll by combining conventional happy pastoral iconography with symptoms of oppressive rural labour and poverty (particularly in the bowed figure of the woodcutter). Any such ambivalence failed to cast a shadow over one enthusiastic contemporary accolade, by ‘D. W.’, published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1773. The lines strike just those sentiments that were to become attached to cottage scenery in the following century, particularly as a sanctuary of domestic love: Oh! to thy charming cottage let me rove, That scene of beauty, and domestic love; There could I gaze for ever, and admire Thy genius, judgment, elegance, and fire: And, were that cottage mine, no lordly peer For mercenary gold should enter there.

The controversially stooped faggot-bearer and his dog reappear in one of J. T. Smith’s drawings of decaying cottages (illus. 116) in his Remarks on Rural Scenery (1797), a documentary enterprise on which (as we have seen) he engaged the young John Constable to research picturesque cottages in Gainsborough’s East Anglian countryside. Gainsborough is the one artist Smith singled out in his book for having given ‘distinct characteristics and original varieties to his cottagery’. It is another reminder of what a formative influence Gainsborough was on the character of post-Gilpin picturesque English landscape. Smith distinguished two kinds of cottage scenery, ‘the neat, and the neglected’, and of course it was the more neglected cottage that Smith recommended for the artist:

285

a sweet view

The weather-beaten thatch, bunchy and varied with moss – the mutilated chimney top – the fissures and crevices of the inclining wall – the roof of various angles and inclinations – the tiles of different hues – the fence of bungling workmanship – the wild unrestrained vine, whose ‘gadding’ branches nearly deprive the chambers of their wonted light – the paper-pasted casement, with here and there a wisp of straw stuffed through a broken pane – the decayed bee-hive and the broken basket – the fragment of a chair or bench – the mischievous pranks of ragged children – the intrusion of pigs – and the unrepaired accidents of wind and rain – offer far greater allurements to the painter’s eye, than more neat, regular or formal arrangements could possibly have done.

286

116 J. T. Smith, ‘Near Battle Bridge, Middx’, engraving from Remarks on Rural Scenery (1797).

The Country Cottage

117 J. T. Smith, A Sketching Lesson at a Cottage Door, n.d., ink and watercolour on paper.

In order to find ‘the richest treasure of pictoresque [sic] Nature’, Smith advised the artist to ‘retire into the inmost recesses of forests, and most obscure and unfrequented villages’, or to ‘the remote wild common’. There could be found ‘the antient, feeble, roofoppressed hovel, fenced with various patches of brick and stone and mud-mix’d wall with quick hedge – stakes and rails, and wreathings composed of the stubborn thorn and the pliant willow’. Smith was in the vanguard of tutorial advice to amateur artists where dishevelled cottage scenery was concerned. The country cottage became a favoured subject for amateur painters (illus. 117), and for cultivated young ladies to practise their water­colour skill on. In Jane Eyre (1847), the heroine possibly reflects Charlotte Brontë’s own initiation into landscape drawing (illus. 118). While at school (ch. 8), Jane learns the verb être and sketches her first cottage on the same day: a cottage ‘whose walls, by the way, outrivalled in slope those of the leaning tower of Pisa’. In Charles Dickens’s second Christmas book, The Chimes (1844), in ‘The Third Quarter’, the poor cottager Will Fern mildly reproaches the practice of picturesque cottage painting by the genteel ladies (illus. 119): ‘I’ve seen the ladies draw it in their books a hundred times. It looks well in a picter, I’ve heerd say; but there an’t weather in picters, and maybe ’tis fitter for that, than for a place to live in.’ We heard earlier, in Chapter Three, of John Ruskin’s conflicted aesthetic and moral impulses as he strolled around the outskirts of Amiens, down among the ramshackle cottages of the poor, and recorded in his diary: ‘as I looked to-day . . . at the 287

118 Charlotte Brontë, Country Cottage, 1829, pencil on paper.

119 Clarkson Stanfield, ‘Will Fern’s Cottage’, illustration from Charles Dickens, The Chimes (1845 edition).

The Country Cottage

people, men as well as women, who sat spinning gloomily at the cottage doors, I could not help feeling how many suffering persons must pay for my picturesque subject and happy walk.’

The cottage in the landscape In the face of mass urbanization and industrialization, and the perceived alienation from the natural world (‘God made the Country and Man made the City’ was the epigraph to Rickman’s Fallen Cottage), there was a renewed stress on the integration of the rural homestead with its landscape. A good illustration of this occurs in Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes (1835). In the section entitled ‘Aspect of the Country, as Affected by Its Inhabitants’, he discusses the stone cottages of the Lakes: As these houses have been, from father to son, inhabited by persons engaged in the same occupations, yet necessarily with changes in their circumstances, they have received without incongruity additions and accommodations adapted to the

120 Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, Cottage in Patterdale, Westmoreland, 1783, oil on canvas.

289

a sweet view 121 James Merigot, after John ‘Warwick’ Smith, Pocklington’s Island, Keswick Lake, 1795, etching and aquatint.

needs of each successive occupant . . . so that these humble dwellings remind the contemplative spectator of a production of Nature, and may . . . rather be said to have grown than to have been erected; to have risen, by an instinct of their own, out of the native rock – so little is there in them of formality, such is their wildness and beauty. The irregular expansion of the cottage to adapt to new generations of occupants is greeted with the same pleasure as in Emma’s response to the irregular development of Mr Knightley’s Donwell Abbey. The Lakeland cottage appears as a ‘production of Nature’ in its spontaneous generation from the native rock. Not only is it a bulwark against the new age of industrialization and urban blight, but also it stands as a challenge to some of the wholly inappropriate Palladian imports into the natural landscape, such as Joseph Pocklington’s mansion on Derwentwater (illus. 121). In Loutherbourg’s Patterdale scene (illus. 120), the cottage’s contour echoes the mountain line, and is embedded into the landscape from which its materials originally came. Those local ma­­­­­­­terials, ‘unhewn’ Lakeland limestone and rough slates, 290

The Country Cottage

continues Wordsworth, were ‘rudely taken from the quarry before the present art of splitting them was understood’. The roofing is therefore rough, so that both the coverings and sides of the houses have furnished places of rest for the seeds of lichens, mosses, ferns, and flowers. Hence buildings, which in their very form call to mind the processes of Nature, do thus, clothed in part with a vegetable garb, appear to be received into the bosom of the living principle of things, as it acts and exists among the woods and fields; and, by their colour and their shape, affectingly direct the thoughts to that tranquil course of Nature and simplicity, along which the humble-minded inhabitants have, through so many generations, been led. Wordsworth’s fancy that the Lakeland cottages were autochthonous creations (‘risen, by an instinct of their own, out of the native rock’) echoes the comment made by William Blake when, in 1800, he and his wife took possession of their Sussex cottage at Felpham. Blake was struck immediately by its beauty and simplicity: ‘Nothing can be more Grand than its Simplicity . . . it seems to be the Spontaneous Effusion of Humanity’ – as if it had just materialized as a small thatched-roof, brick-and-flint satisfaction of simple, basic human needs. The concern about the cottage as symbol and symptom of the national culture was taken up by the young John Ruskin in The Poetry of Architecture (1837–8). There he compared the typical English lowland cottage in its contemporary landscape with its French rural equivalent. The principal characteristic of the English cottage, according to Ruskin, was its ‘finished neatness’: its pegged-down and mathematically levelled thatch, its stainless whitewash, its gleaming lattice windows, the honeysuckle and sweet briar curling up around it from the little garden. It was thus 291

a sweet view ‘pretty and appropriate’ in its country setting. He then compared it with the characteristic French cottage: Half the whitewash is worn off, and the other half coloured by various mosses and wandering lichens . . . The tall roof of the garrett windows stands fantastically out; and underneath it, where, in England, we had a plain double lattice, is a deep recess . . . built of solid masses of grey stone, fluted on the edge . . . The door . . . is also of stone, which is so broken and disguised as to prevent it from giving any idea of strength or stability. The entrance is always open; no roses, or anything else, are wreathed about it. Ruskin was struck by the French cottage’s ‘general air of nonchalance’ compared with its tidy English counterpart, and by the ways in which ‘they assimilate with the countries in which they are found.’ In England, ‘every scene is in miniature . . . and there is a sense of something inexpressible, except by the truly English word “snug”, in every nook and sheltered lane . . . fruit trees neatly pruned . . . roads beautifully made, &c.’ France, by contrast, is a large country, and ‘there is a kind of comfortless sublimity in the size of every scene.’ In contemporary England, he claims, ‘the spirit of well-principled housemaids [is] everywhere, exerting itself for perpetual propriety and renovation, so that nothing is old, but only “old-fashioned”.’ England was a country of growing prosperity and industry: ‘everything is perpetually altered and renewed by the activity of invention and improvement’, and the English cottage was ‘never suffered to get old’. The air of nonchalance and the general dilapidation of the French cottage ‘tell a thousand times more agreeably to an eye accustomed to the picturesque, than the spruce preservation of the English cottage’. Ruskin’s vigorous antipathy to England’s ‘spruce preser­va­ tion’ and renovation of its rural antiquities compared with France’s 292

The Country Cottage

sublime negligence focuses the broader personality of English scenery favoured in the Victorian period (and it is a ‘lowland’ England that is under scrutiny). The snugness and comfort that had become essential to the rural idyll’s sweet view (Emma’s ‘English comfort’) are deeply dispiriting to Ruskin; they suffocate the historical imagination. That ‘spirit of well-principled housemaids’ exerts its discipline to tidy away any loose, decaying ends, and with that any sense of history, of human loss and mutability – ‘the entire denial of all human calamity and care, in the swept proprieties and neatnesses of English modernism’ – because it asserts that nothing has been lost. All is successfully restored, renewed, in a carefully edited version of continuity with Old England. The prim, ‘old-fashioned’ English cottage may have thwarted Ruskin’s desire for a ‘poetry of architecture’ that elegized noble fortitude under suffering, but that longing was difficult to reconcile with his acknowledgement that ‘many suffering persons must pay for my picturesque subject’, as he confessed on his Amiens stroll. This old tension in the picturesque between visual relish for the patina of weathered antiquity and moral sympathy for the victims of poverty who inhabited such places continued to worry the Victorians. Tom Taylor, the writer who collaborated with Foster in his Pictures of English Landscape (1863) to reinforce Foster’s evocative woodcuts with short poems rhapsodizing about English scenery, included in that book a discordant apostrophe to ‘Old Cottages’. It started conventionally enough, with ‘How picturesque their moss and weather-stain,/ Their golden thatch . . . white-washed wall and deep-sunk lattice pane’, guelder roses and twining ivy, and so on, but then came this: All these I know, – know, too, the plagues that prey On those who dwell in these depainted bowers: The foul miasma of their crowded rooms, Unaired, unlit, with green damps moulded o’er. 293

a sweet view Taylor concludes, ‘I wish the picturesqueness less,/ And welcome the utilitarian hand,’ which replaces this romanticized hovel with an airy, modern cottage, well-built and ‘right-angled true’. The result will be a decent home, ‘By sketchers shunned, but shunned by fevers too’.

Cottage revivalism and the woman’s domain An English Cottage Home; – the shrine Of all that’s pure; of comforts and of joys Domestic, and where bliss connubial Owns treasures sweet.

How might the obsolescent cottage culture in a modernizing nation be kept alive? Over the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century the cottage gained its status as integral to the national identity largely because of the developing domestic ideology in Victorian England. James Holroyde’s lines about the ‘English Cottage Home’ (written in 1885), its purity, domestic joy and connubial bliss, epitomize the sense in which it had become the repository of such values (illus. 122; see also illus. 75). In the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth the self-sufficient cottage, a frugal fortress against Luxury (as presented in Rickman’s poem), had become a focus for social reform – and with increased urgency, following the French Revolution and given English fears of insurrection from a dispossessed rural population. The Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor (founded in 1796) published several pamphlets of advice for the management of 294

122 Myles Birket Foster (?), ‘A Very Bower of Roses’, illustration from James Holroyde, English Scenery (1885).

The Country Cottage

123 Title page to Thomas Bernard, An Account of a Cottage and Garden, near Tadcaster (1797).

cottage economy. The author of one of these rails against what he feels to be the defects of the parish provision for the poor – ‘that the idle and profligate are maintained in part at their [the industrious poor’s] expense’ (original italics). He points to the example of one, Britton Abbot, a labourer with six children who was moved off his house and small plot of land near Tadcaster by an enclosure order. Abbot managed to persuade a local squire to give him a small piece of waste land on approval, and over time transformed it into something resembling the trim garden and cottage depicted on the Account’s title page (illus. 123). When the squire commended his industry, he replied, ‘Now, Sir, you have a pleasure in seeing my cottage and garden neat: and why should not other squires have the same pleasure, in seeing the cottages and gardens as nice about them? The poor would then be happy; and would love them, and the place where they lived.’ A similar agenda was behind William Cobbett’s Cottage Economy (1821–2), designed to give the rural labourer’s family the practical skills to secure them a contented independence (independence from the parish workhouse no less than from predatory evangelical doctrines). The provision of cottages and smallholdings after the Napoleonic Wars had economic benefits for the wider parish as well as the wealthy landowners. This was a point made by several publications, national and provincial. For instance, the Northampton Mercury in 1816 called its readers’ attention to the Quarterly Review’s proposals: ‘The advantages of granting small portions of land to Cottagers, and of increasing the number of small Farms, are strongly recommended by the Quarterly Reviewers, as the 295

a sweet view most effectual mode of relieving the condition of the agricultural poor, and consequently lessening the amount of the Poor’s Rate.’ In addition to reducing the tax burden for the Parish Rates, there was the inducement, noted by Abbot, of enhanced aesthetic value; the new cottage and its garden would reward its landowner with a pleasing picturesque spectacle. The pamphlet follows up the implications of Abbot’s remarks in a footnote: ‘Picturesque cottages might be so disposed around a park, as to ornament and enliven the scenery with much more effect, than those misplaced Gothic castles, and those pigmy models of Grecian temples, that perverted taste is so busy with: but it is the unfortunate principle of ornamental buildings in England, that they should be uninhabited and uninhabitable.’ In the 1790s, with those fears of social revolution dictating so much of the political climate in England, the Account’s title-page picture of cottage and trim garden was potent propaganda for attracting the labouring poor into civil obedience, and at the same time persuading the landowning class of the additional aesthetic advantages of making such economic and philanthropic initiatives on their property. Practical steps were taken to salvage the cottage idyll. James Malton’s Essay on British Architecture (1798) described its agenda as ‘an attempt to perpetuate on principle, that peculiar mode of building, which was originally the effect of chance’ – touching that note of typically English picturesque compromise between the wild and the cultivated, the spontaneous and the planned. Malton established the ideal cottage as ‘a small house, of odd, irregular form, with various harmonious colouring, the effects of weather, time, and accident, the whole environed with smiling verdure, having a contented, cheerful, inviting aspect, and a door open to receive a gossip neighbour, or weary, exhausted traveller’. The architect Peter Frederick Robinson’s books of designs for cottages and villas sought to ‘preserve, in some degree, features 296

The Country Cottage

which afford so much pleasure when an ancient cottage can be found in primitive simplicity’. So he wrote in his Preface to the second edition of Rural Architecture (originally published in 1822). That he held the picturesque values of the cottage to be a high priority is clear from the short ‘Address’ in his later work Village Architecture (1830): ‘I have endeavoured to show . . . that instead of destroying the ancient gabled Cottage, the forms may be preserved which our painters have so long delighted to portray, and which have in fact given real value to their pictures.’ Both the thatched rural slum dwelling and the smartly renovated ‘old-fashioned’ English cottage that Ruskin deplored are a long way from that Romantic sense of the cottage as the robust vernacular custodian of ancient British hardihood, rugged goodnaturedness and open hospitality. There was, however, a revival of cottage building in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the so-called period of High Farming. John Nash’s Regency develop­ ment Blaise Hamlet, north of Bristol, had been an early forerunner. The philanthropic John Harford had commissioned Nash to design a group of picturesque cottages clustered around a village green, to be occupied by Harford’s retired workers. That kind of initiative prospered in the High Farming period as landowners increased their profits. The period coincided with a Gothic revivalism in architecture and a romanticized notion of feudalism, and the latter spurred numbers of landowners to construct model cottages on their estates. In 1849 a leading article in The Times reported: ‘in these days every gentleman of standing and pretension professes to be a philanthropist . . . There is hardly a young nobleman or young gentleman of property who does not build churches, model cottages, and schools.’ They were encouraged in their projects by the lively market for books of cottage designs. Robinson’s Rural Architecture was into its fifth edition by 1850. This revived cottage idyll as a practical (if sentimentalized) expression of social planning reflected the changes brought 297

a sweet view about by early Victorian repudiation of the old picturesque, and it harnessed the energy of the ‘utilitarian hand’ recognized by Taylor. The cottage’s value as an emblem of domestic security and contentment is particularly treasured in an urban context. Southey’s ‘Ruined Cottage’ had traced the story of ruined innocence with the seduction of a country girl, the pure daughter of the cottage family. His notebook sketched the scenario in which that poor cottage girl becomes a street-walker. An echo of this appeared in Cruikshank’s The Bottle (1847), which we looked at in the previous chapter. In Plate i (illus. 124), in addition to the framed picture of the country church, there is the mantelpiece ornament, centrally placed, of a little pottery Cottage of Content. By the time the father’s drinking has undermined the poor family,

298

124, 125 Details of George Cruikshank, The Bottle, 1847, plates i and iii.

The Country Cottage

in Plate iii (illus. 125), that Cottage has collapsed sideways. It is another ‘fallen cottage’, prefiguring the ‘fallen woman’, which is the destination of the poor little girl seen here clutching her mother’s knee. The revived cottage idyll, with its sweet associations of frugality, virtue and cosiness in opposition to Luxury and the physical and moral pollution of the city, was, as we have seen, also caused by transformations in domestic ideology and the role of women. It is in this context that one can understand the extraordinary success of the most popular portraitist of the English cottage, Helen Allingham, in her late Victorian cottage pictures. Allingham (née Paterson) contributed illustrations to magazines such as Once a Week and Cornhill – including the illustrations for the serialization of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd in 1874. In that year she married the poet and magazine editor William Allingham, and in the early 1880s they moved to a house in Surrey’s Sandhills, a hamlet in the neighbourhood of Witley village, where Foster had his home. Allingham acknow­ l­edged that Foster was one of her principal influences. In the 1880s and 1890s she produced hundreds of watercolours of English cottage scenery, mainly in Surrey, a location and motif that attracted many contemporary watercolourists, such as Charles Edward Wilson (another Witley resident) and Arthur Claude Strachan. The cottage, as we have seen, had featured in English culture in many ways from the mid-eighteenth century through to this late Victorian period of Allingham’s portraits: as a corrective emblem promoting the values of moderation and preservation of human scale; and as a structure in ecological harmony with the natural world, in its use of local materials for its original construction, in its natural, organic development over generations of inhabitants, and in the hospitality of its built materials for wildlife as well as its human occupants (nesting birds, lichen and 299

a sweet view honeysuckle). It also became an idealized antidote to the surge in Victorian urbanization, and an image of continuity with a past age. It stood as a patient survivor. With its sunken roof and warped timbers it represented the osteoporotic backbone of Old England, uncorrupted by Luxury, just about withstanding the convulsions of industrial and urban modernity. But by the last decades of the nineteenth century the traditional old cottage was an endangered species. Just as the Morning Chronicle in 1796 had reported the catastrophic decline in cottage dwellings across England, so, just over a century later, Marcus Huish, former editor of the Art Journal, recorded that at least ‘a thousand ancient cottages are now disappearing in England every twelvemonth, without trace or record left.’ That was largely the rationale for his promotion of Allingham’s work, and for his publishing the book Happy England as Painted by Helen Allingham, r.w.s. in 1903. There is a new ideological thrust in Allingham’s cottage scenery. In her hands the southern English cottage becomes an instrument for promoting Victorian domestic ideology, a space reserved for womanhood in the context of the ‘separate spheres’ (men for the public world, women for the private world of Home). It also serves as a sanctuary for virtue, bearing in mind the associated fallen cottage and fallen woman motifs in Cruik­ shank’s Bottle sequence. This cluster of values is reinforced in Stewart Dick’s The Cottage Homes of England (1909), copiously illustrated with prints of Allingham’s watercolours. Dick acclaimed Allingham as a member of ‘the old school of water-colour painting’, quite distinct from ‘the modern impressionist’, who, he wrote, is interested only in the play of light on the varying surfaces. Allingham, instead, ‘realises the feeling of calm domesticity which has spread over the scene’, and makes it her subject. This calm, diffused influence is expressed in the noticeable lack of lighting drama in her paintings, and ‘It is to this home feeling, this sympathy with rural life in all its forms, that her work owes 300

The Country Cottage

126 Helen Allingham, A Sussex Cottage, n.d., watercolour. 127 Helen Allingham, At the Garden Gate, n.d., watercolour.

much of the charm which has made it so deservedly popular . . . She sees in [the cottage] the essence of the old English country life.’ It is the strong gendering of her cottage idyll that is particularly striking in Allingham’s pictures. The landscape and cottages are emphatically feminized. This is very different from the masculine patriarchal values associated with the English cottage a century before. The new gendering is conspicuous in the absence from the scene of menfolk and in the repeated presence of the woman, or woman and child, waiting at the garden gate and looking out expectantly towards the viewer (illus. 126, 127). It is also implicit in the soft, domesticated nature of the surrounding scenery, in the embosoming landscape. The cottage homes over which the women preside are tucked into their nests of hedge, rehearsing that identification of a lost, vulnerable, natural world with woman­ hood. Quietly it brims with life. Remote from Victorian industrial and metropolitan life, it is discreetly half-hidden, unobtrusive, just as Victorian womanhood should be in the ‘separate spheres’ 301

a sweet view dispensation. And, just as Victorian woman should also be, in that context, it looks lushly fertile. The cottage home had traditionally been an emblem of hospitality to the casual passer-by; so it is in Allingham’s cottage scenes. They nearly always provide a path to this partially hidden world and to the waiting woman, or woman with child – a path that reaches straight out towards the viewer. We are now the passers-by; and we seem to be beckoned in. Who, then, was meant to be responding to the fin-de-siècle Allingham invitation? One customer would certainly be the prospering middle-class Victorian male and city worker. He now has the money to buy these paintings, and perhaps also the cottages themselves. After all, he has long ago ‘bought into’ the sweet view of England’s seductive cottage idyll. The absence of men in these cottage scenes was eerily prophetic. In 1915, just a few years after Dick’s book appeared, a sweet view of England was widely published. It is the war recruitment poster we met near the start of Chapter One above (illus. 4). The menfolk are literally marginalized from the heart of this idyllic English countryside, and for good reason. Theirs is now the responsibility to protect, with their lives if necessary, this precious scene written so eloquently into the landscape imagery. The guardian soldier beckons us to absorb the scene and its implications – ‘English verdure, English culture, English comfort’. The survival of the sweet view is now a matter of life and death.

302

epilogue

‘A Haunt of Ancient Peace’

I

n 1911 the eighty-year-old Frederic Harrison, lawyer and writer, looked back on his London childhood in the 1830s. He had grown up in rural Muswell Hill, about 10 kilometres (6 mi.) from St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘My earliest recollections are entirely those of the country, and of a very beautiful country – green, shady, and smokeless . . . When I was a child, in every city of the kingdom, and even in most parts of London, an easy walk would take a man into quiet fields and pure air.’ In the time of Harrison’s childhood, most people in England and Wales lived in rural areas. Two or three decades later half the population had become urban dwellers, and by 1911 the rural population had dropped to just over 20 per cent. Within a lifetime, for most Victorians the quiet fields and pure air of the countryside became increasingly distant, both as memory and as accessible topography. Its loss was partly compensated for by that ‘sweet view’ – ‘sweet to the eye and the mind’ – of English countryside sedulously fashioned over a century or more by writers and artists. The solace of these virtual countrysides became a significant cultural force. Such was Charles Kingsley’s encouragement to London’s workers in 1848:

303

a sweet view Picture-galleries should be the townsman’s paradise of refreshment. Of course, if he can get the real air, the real trees, even for an hour, let him take it, in God’s name; but how many a man who cannot spare time for a daily country walk, may well slip into the National Gallery, or any other collection of pictures, for ten minutes. That garden, at least, flowers as gaily in winter as in summer . . . There, in the space of a single room, the townsman may take his country walk – a walk beneath mountain peaks, blushing sunsets, with broad woodlands spreading out below it; a walk through green meadows, under cool mellow shades, and overhanging rocks, by rushing brooks, where he watches and watches till he seems to hear the foam whisper, and to see the fishes leap; and his hard-worn heart wanders out free, beyond the grim city-world of stone and iron, smoky chimneys, and roaring wheels, into the world of beautiful things. Among the National Gallery’s country scenes, the Victorian Londoner could saunter into Constable’s shady Cornfield lane, past the sheepdog and drinking shepherd boy, and, at the turn of the path, pause by the broken gate to enjoy the burst of golden light over the cornfield, and sense the noonday breeze tugging at the foliage high above. ‘To hear . . . to see’, as Kingsley urges; through painting one could make a sensory journey back into a faintly familiar past, with nature’s energy perhaps awakening a memory or two. After all, Constable painted his Cornfield in his London studio, as a memory, imagining himself back in the Suffolk countryside of his youth. Like so many in Victorian England, he could live in two worlds, in the modern city and in a countryside of the mind, furnished by the painters and nature writers: ‘Though I am here in the midst of the world,’ he wrote in 1823 from his London home, ‘I am out of it – and am happy . . . I have a kingdom of my own . . . my landscape and my children.’ 304

‘A Haunt of Ancient Peace’

The solace of sunlit rural scenes was available not only in the great public galleries, but also, for those who could afford it, in the private home. The landscape painter ‘brings into our rooms rays of sunlight and colour, to which, without him, we might be strangers for months together,’ wrote the artist William Wilthew Fenn: ‘He opens . . . a window on yonder sombre wall, and bidding us look forth, shows us by the wave of his magic brush a glimpse of “The glory of God,” letting daylight, air, and life fall upon us.’ These scenes of a gloriously lit countryside fell like the vision of another world on ‘eyes which have looked into shop windows and across crowded streets for half a century . . . None of us – poor street-struck creatures! – can see the things we ought to see.’ (It reminds one of Samuel Palmer’s Bellman village scene looking out from a Bond Street shop window.)Such was the lament of Walter Besant, Richard Jefferies’s eulogist. As for poor William Fenn, he had become a permanent stranger to sunlight and colour, having lost his eyesight when he was 25. Living with English country scenery on one’s walls or in the pages of books generated a mindset congenial to English nostalgia for comfortable countryside, and for inhabiting it in imagination. ‘Tennyson, we cannot live in art,’ protested one of the poet’s friends while they were at university in the late 1820s. Tennyson responded with the poem ‘The Palace of Art’, completed in the spring of 1832. He imagined into being a lavish palace for his soul, insulated from the fretful real world. The rooms are adorned with pictures of ‘every landscape fair,/ As fit for every mood of mind’; nothing from the real world encroaches on these exquisitely wrought images of rural life and scenery: And one, an English home – gray twilight pour’d On dewy pastures, dewy trees, Softer than sleep – all things in order stored, A haunt of ancient Peace. 305

a sweet view Tennyson’s ancient English country home is softened by twilight, soundless as the dew settles, a haven of calm order. The organ notes of that sonorous last line echoed far into the century as a musical epitome of English domestic longing. It nuanced the sweet view. Dante Gabriel Rossetti picked it up when he described William Morris’s Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire as a ‘haunt of ancient peace’. A painting of 1897 by Alfred East carried the title A Haunt of Ancient Peace (illus. 128). It is a river scene with a ‘gray twilight poured on dewy pastures’. The moon is already up and silvering the water, as two men bring a punt into the bank after a fishing expedition. One of them carries a basket and is about to make his way up to a house partly screened by trees, with a bright glow of light from one of the windows – a welcoming home. Homecoming is the theme, implicit or explicit, in many late Victorian paintings of the sweet view. We saw it in Samuel Palmer’s twilight pastorals, as well as in Helen Allingham’s inviting cottage pathways. The sentiment, whether explicit or otherwise, had a natural appeal for those thousands staffing the vast global Empire, as well as for those tens of thousands who had emigrated

128 Alfred East, A Haunt of Ancient Peace, 1897, oil on canvas.

306

‘A Haunt of Ancient Peace’ 129 Benjamin Williams Leader, February, Fill Dyke, 1881, oil on canvas.

permanently to new lives far from England (two-thirds of a million people from England and Wales emigrated over the decade from 1861). But it was also a potent call for the population at home, especially for all those reorientating to new mental topography in the Victorian cities. The countryside itself became that home, that haunt of ancient peace. So many English landscape canvases from the 1880s and 1890s could be captioned ‘Haunt of Ancient Peace’ or ‘An Autumn Afterglow’ (the title of a painting of 1887 by East). In this period, according to the historian of late Victorian art Kenneth McConkey, the Royal Academy received ‘endless lingering autumns and golden twilights wrapped in poetic titles such as When Lingering Daylight welcomes Night’s Pale Queen . . . The Evening Sun has lengthened every Shade . . . Twixt the Gloaming and the Mirk’. The energy of Constable’s noon landscapes, set in summertime with the sun high amid the boisterous clouds and the breezes swinging the trees, seems a distant memory when we gaze at these stilled, crepuscular scenes. Benjamin Williams Leader’s well-known February, Fill Dyke (c. 1881; illus. 129) is a rich example. It brings those familiar staple motifs, cottages and church tower, together 307

a sweet view beneath a line of bare elms, their tracery delicately worked like a rood screen through which a barred sunset gleams, inflaming the patches of floodwater in the fields. Prints of this painting were issued over the following years, and proved extraordinarily popular. Why so, one wonders? Maybe the sombre mood in these landscapes reflected the succession of wet summers and poor harvests between 1875 and 1882. The countryside idyll had also to contend with agricultural depression brought about by decay, neglect and large-scale rural depopulation. The rural ‘peace’ was both a romantic dream and a social reality brought about by an emptying countryside and untenanted cottages. February, Fill Dyke has a curious look of burnished stagnation. Emma’s sweet view was a subtle work of art, an old house in grounds that had been shaped over the centuries by human use in sympathy with the natural landscape and its resources. The ‘English culture’ invoked in response to the scene struck the balance that was to typify the Victorians’ shaping of the image and personality of the English countryside, particularly that of the South Country. Caught up in the currents of the voguish picturesque, the English beau ideal drifted from the subtly landscaped grounds of the great houses to settle on the vernacular scenery of snug villages and thatched cottages, hedgerowbordered fields and country churchyards, all redolent with the sense of Home. I close with two images of English garden scenery. Painted nearly a century apart, they seem to epitomize the changes in mood that I have been discussing. The first is Samuel Palmer’s In a Shoreham Garden (c. 1829) (illus. 130); the second is John William North’s 1914 in England (1914) (illus. 131). North donated his watercolour to the Victoria and Albert Museum in the year of its completion, although why he did so is not clear. A Museum note accompanying the painting has the following: ‘It represents an idyllic vision of England on the brink of World War One, the 308

‘A Haunt of Ancient Peace’

130 Samuel Palmer, In a Shoreham Garden, c. 1829, watercolour.

abundant apple tree and thatched cottage reminiscent of the work of Samuel Palmer.’ Palmer and his Ancients had drawn on William Blake in the 1820s to spiritualize their images of English landscape; nearly a century later North was also turning to Blake for his visions of England. Over the war years, after 1914 in England, North submitted a sequence of paintings to the Royal Academy. Blake’s name featured in all their titles; so did Blake’s line from Milton, ‘In England’s green and pleasant land’. Both Palmer and North 309

‘A Haunt of Ancient Peace’ 131 John William North, 1914 in England, 1914, watercolour on paper.

turned their ‘green and pleasant land’ into a rural idyll and, in North’s case, a haunt of ancient peace. The similarities and differences between their sweet views of England are very striking. We can sense this in comparing North’s painting with Palmer’s Shoreham Garden. Each scene is dominated by a large apple tree, rich in fruit or blossom, and beneath this is a solitary woman. Palmer’s strong, sinewy tree trunk stands proud, like the woman beneath, and rears upwards to release its erupting blossom. The image brims with a mystical fecundity; the body-colour paint that has swollen the blossom is almost overloaded. One exuberantly impastoed swag of flowers has actually fallen off the paint surface, exposing the bare board. North’s England has suffered, too, although not through overabundance of energy: ‘Parts of the watercolour have become fuzzy over time,’ says the v&a’s accompanying note. By contrast with the Shoreham garden, North’s old apple tree is bowed, its branches pawing the ground. The fabric of fruit and foliage has the look of a threadbare tapestry draped over a rudimentary framework. The woman beneath has laid aside her book to play with the kitten, but the playfulness doesn’t energize the larger scene, which has a curiously heavy languor. The sun looks partially eclipsed, its light feebly diffused over the landscape. There is an air of melancholy to this particular haunt of ancient peace, here beside those familiar emblems of English countryside, the thatched cottage and the shade of the old apple tree. The moment caught seems very fragile, prone to fading, like the paint itself. It is as though the sunlight is leaving this familiar sweet scene – at least for a while.

311

Notes and References

These notes and references are keyed to the text by chapter, section and page number (in bold). Unless otherwise stated, the place of publication is London. Ruskin, Works refers to the Library Edition of The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London, 1903–12).

Chapter One: The Picturesque and the Promotion of English Landscape 17. Richard Jefferies’s comment ‘. . . a man’s house was himself’ is from Field and Hedgerow, Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies, ‘Collected by His Widow’ (1889), p. 105.  19. Charlotte Brontë’s response to Austen’s world is in her letter to G. H. Lewes, 12 January 1848: The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, ed. M Smith, vol. ii (Oxford, 2000), p. 10.  Paul Readman, Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2018). On foreigners’ view of England as a garden, see William Howitt, The Rural Life of England (1838), vol. ii, p. 29. Emerson’s description of England as a garden occurs in his English Traits (Boston, ma, 1856), p. 40. 20. The ‘relational’ construction of identity is discussed in Mike Crang’s essay ‘Self and Other’, in Cultural Geography (1998). Gerald Newman discusses ‘anti-Frenchness’ in The Rise of English Nationalism (1987), p. 124. For Kriz on the rise of the English school, see Kay Dian Kriz, The Idea of the English Landscape Painter: Genius as Alibi in the Early Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London, 1997). Humphry Repton discusses English gardening and the English constitution in ‘A Letter to Uvedale Price, Esq.’ (1794), in Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque (1810), vol. iii, p. 10. On ‘no longer’ hating the French, see Edward Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English [1833] (Chicago, 1970), p. 38. 21. For Hazlitt on ‘foreign fopperies’, see William Hazlitt, ‘On Means and Ends’, Monthly Magazine, September 313

a sweet view 1827: A. R. Waller and A. Glover, ed., The Collected Works of William Hazlitt (1904), p. 194.  On Eden and English vernacular, see Rachel Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 170–71. 22. For Ian Waites’s discussion of Burke and the landscape metaphor, see Ian Waites, Common Land in English Painting, 1700–1850 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2012), pp. 146–7. William Cowper’s lines on the ‘shelter’d vale’ come from The Task (1785), Book i, ll. 513–14: H. S. Milford, ed., The Poetical Works of William Cowper (1963), p. 140. 23. England’s ‘well bred’ landscape is mentioned in David Lindsay, 27th Earl of Crawford and 10th Earl of Balcarres, The Personality of English Scenery (Oxford, 1930), p. 23.

Promoting English scenery 24. William Morris’s ‘unromantic’ England can be found in his lecture ‘The Lesser Arts’ (1877), in William Morris: Stories in Prose [etc.], ed. G.D.H. Cole (New York, 1974), p. 507.  Robert Southey’s comments on the new vogue for the picturesque are in Letters from England: By Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, vol. i [1807] (3rd edn, 1814), pp. 349–50. 25. On the early picturesque tours, see Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760– 1800 (Aldershot, Hampshire, 1989). The tourist’s adaptation of scenery to classical landscapes is summarized in John Stoddart, Remarks on Local Scenery and Manners in Scotland during the Years 1799 and 1800 (1801), vol. i, p. 2. Gilpin’s summary of picturesque practice comes in William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, &c. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; Made in the Summer of the Year 1770 (1782), pp. 1–2. The printed publication date was 1782, but it actually appeared in 1783.  29. For Walpole’s appeal to English painters to portray their own country, see Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England: With Some Account of the Principal Artists . . . [1762] (1849), vol ii, p. 717.  30. For the low status of landscape art, see Joseph Pott, An Essay on Landscape Painting (1783), p. 17. ‘Intellectual dignity’, according to the Academy’s first president, Joshua Reynolds, was the factor that ennobled the painter’s art in any genre: E. G. Johnson, ed., Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses (Chicago, 1891), Discourse 3 (1770), p. 83.  31. On Thomas Monro’s contribution to landscape art, see Anon., ‘The Royal Academy Exposed’, New Monthly Magazine, May 1833, pp. 73–82. On landscape subjects at the Academy, see Marcia Pointon, Mulready, exh. cat., Victoria and Albert Museum, London (1986), p. 28; and for a full discussion of the complexities of theory and practice in relation to these issues of home scenery, see Kay Dian Kriz, The Idea of the English Landscape Painter: Genius as Alibi in the Early Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London, 1997), ch. 3, ‘The Domestic Landscape 314

Notes and References, pp. 22–42 as Contested Ground’.  33. On promoting cottage scenery, see J. T. Smith, Remarks on Rural Scenery (1797), pp. 5–6. On comparing Welsh scenery with Tivoli, see Henry Wyndham, A Gentleman’s Tour through Monmouthshire and Wales (London, 1775), p. 132. 34. On the foreign dis­­ paragement of English climate, see James Barry, letter to Earl of Buchan [?1805], in The Works of James Barry (1809), vol. i, p. 294.  35. On the same topic, see William Benjamin Sarsfield Taylor, The Origin, Progress, and Present Condition of the Fine Arts in Great Britain and Ireland (1841), vol. ii, pp. 45–6, and col. 1, p. xv. See also Morris Eaves, The Counterarts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca, ny, 1992), pp. 4–8. On Winckelmann’s criticism of English climate, see Leigh Hunt, ‘Remarks on the Past and Present State of the Arts in England’, The Reflector, a Quarterly Magazine, on Subjects of Philosophy, Politics, and the Liberal Arts, i (October 1810–March 1811), p. 229.  36. Joseph Pott champions ‘our northern skies’ in his Essay on Landscape Painting (1783), p. 56. J.M.W. Turner’s remarks on England’s ‘vapoury turbulence’ are quoted in Greg Smith, The Emergence of the Professional Watercolourist (2002), pp. 203–4. Turner’s praise of Thanet skies is reported by John Ruskin in Fors Clavigera, Letter ix: Ruskin, Works, vol. xxvii, p. 164. William Pyne discusses the ‘humid atmosphere’ in ‘Mr Nicholson’s Process for Painting in Water-colours’, Somerset House Gazette, i (1823/4), p. 62.  37. William Gilpin’s discussion of variety and subtle visual effects in English scenery comes in his Observations . . . Mountains, and Lakes of Cumberland, and Westmoreland (1786), vol. ii, pp. 5–11 (Gilpin consistently writes the possessive form of the pronoun ‘it’ as ‘it’s’; I have silently adjusted this in all quotation from his work). 38. Mr Polly’s reflections on English scenery are in H. G. Wells, The History of Mr Polly (1920), p. 28. For Lowenthal and Prince’s discussion of England’s ‘succession of new vistas’, see David Lowenthal and Hugh C. Prince, ‘The English Landscape’, Geographical Review, liv/3 (July 1964), p. 309.  39. The twentieth-century doubling of hedgerow trees is recorded in Oliver Rackham, The Illustrated History of the Countryside (1994), pp. 93–4, and the 1960s figures for timber in hedgerows are in Lowenthal and Prince, ‘The English Landscape’, p. 311.  41. Frederick Law Olmsted praises English scenery in Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (New York, 1852), p. 87.

Association and local attachment 42. One of the fullest and best accounts of the origins of associationism and its influence on aesthetics is in Walter Jackson Bate’s study From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-century England (1946), where he outlines why in particular the British ‘welcomed a satisfying empirical explanation for aesthetics’, rather than having to 315

a sweet view accept abstract philosophical formulations or Academy criteria for the beau ideal. The elevated aesthetic authority of individual subjective responses, as apparently sanctioned by associationism, was welcomed as a liberation. For Coleridge on association, see S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), vol. i, p. 72.  43. The tourist’s remarks on association processes are in John Bristed, Anthroplanomenos; or, A Pedestrian Tour through Part of the Highlands of Scotland, in 1801 (London, 1803), vol. ii, pp. 416–17. 44. Rogers’s ‘Analysis’ is in Samuel Rogers, The Pleasures of Memory (new edn, 1799), p. vii; and the lines from the poem on pp. 22–3.  45. For Hume on ‘different sentiments’, see David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, Part i, Essay xxiii, in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London and New York, 1889), vol. i, p. 268.  46. On the local versus the ‘universalist’ aesthetic, see Kay Dian Kriz, The Idea of the English Landscape Painter: Genius as Alibi in the Early Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London, 1997), p. 77; Kriz invokes the late twentieth-century arguments of John Barrell, Ann Bermingham and David Simpson in plotting the ideologically charged significance of the shifting meanings of ‘nature’ in this period and its links with revolutionary and counter-revolutionary political discourse. Polwhele’s stanza is from John Polwhele, The Influence of Local Attachment with Respect to Home. A Poem (1796), stanza 18.  47. Thomas Burgess discusses ‘hereditary climate’ in Climate of Italy in Relation to Pulmonary Consumption (1852), p. 23. McKillop’s essay is ‘Local Attachment and Cosmopolitanism: The Eighteenth-century Pattern’, in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. F. W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York, 1965), pp. 191–218. 48. For Samuel Rogers on patriotism, see The Pleasures of Memory, p. vii. Constable’s remark on his hedge and lane material is in John Constable, letter to C. R. Leslie, 14 January 1832, in C. R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (1845), p. 222.

Chapter Two: Roughness, Neglect and Constable’s ‘Genuine English Scenery’ 49. Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review, 6 May 1826, p. 286, reviewing Constable’s The Cornfield. For an excellent, fuller discussion of Constable and Englishness, see Stephen Daniels, ‘John Constable and the Making of Constable Country’, ch. 7 in Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge, Oxford and Boston, ma, 1993). On The Cornfield’s popular appeal, see Colin Painter, At Home with Constable’s Cornfield, exh. cat., National Gallery, London (1996).

316

Notes and References, pp. 43–62

Rough nature in retreat 50. Gilpin discusses roughness in William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape (1792), pp. 26–7.  52. ‘Wilde Regularitie’ is discussed in Sir Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture (1624), p. 109. On the ‘free, bold touch’, see Gilpin, Three Essays, p. 17. 53. For Taylor on sketching ‘the ignoble’, see William Taylor, ‘Outlines of a Discourse on the History and Theory of Prospect-painting’, Monthly Magazine, xxxvii (1814), pp. 405–9: quoted in Andrew Hemingway, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, 1992), p. 73. ‘A la pittoresk’ is discussed in William Aglionby, Painting Illustrated in Three Diallogues (1685), pp. 23–4. On the taste for sketchiness, see David A. Brenneman, ‘Thomas Gainsborough and the Picturesque Sketch’, Word & Image, xiii/4 (1997), pp. 392–404. For Burke on the sketch, see Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), p. 59. 54. Reynolds’s letter to Gilpin is in Gilpin, Three Essays, p. 37.  The ‘great end’ of landscape painting is discussed in William Marshall, A Review of The Landscape, a Didactic Poem . . . (1795), pp. 255–6. For an excellent discussion of agricultural improvement in the context of landscape aesthetics, see John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840 (Cambridge, 1972), especially the chapter ‘The Land­­ scape of Agricultural Improvement’. For enclosure hedging, see Oliver Rackham, The Illustrated History of the Countryside (1994), pp. 71–84. 56. For the ‘Mushroom halls’ and the wastes, see W. G. Hoskins and L. Dudley Stamp, The Common Lands of England and Wales (1963), pp. 54–6; and Richard Heath, The Victorian Peasant (Gloucester and New York, 1989), p. 4; and more generally Ian Waites, Common Land in English Painting, 1700–1850 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2012).  57. The lines on Industry are from Thomas Batchelor, Village Scenes, The Progress of Agriculture, and Other Poems (1804), p. 82. 58. For Plymley’s regret about lost Nature, see Joseph Plymley, General View of the Agriculture of Shropshire (1813), p. 145; and Waites, Common Land, p. 103.  59. For Uvedale Price on Ruysdael and Gainsborough, see Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and On the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape (1796), pp. 40–41.  60. Gainsborough writes on the ‘sweet Village’ in a letter to William Jackson: Mary Woodall, ed., The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough (rev. edn, 1963), p. 115. 61. For Price’s memories of Gainsborough, see Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque (1810), vol. ii, p. 368. 62. For Price on painting’s humanizing influence, see ibid., vol. i, pp. 338–9. 317

a sweet view Irritation, beauty and utility 63. Visual irritation is discussed in Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque (1810), vol. i, pp. 115–28.  64. Bernard Berenson’s remarks on the ‘tactile consciousness’ are in his The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (1896), p. 5. For the demise of physical tactility, see Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, nc, 2000), p. 165. On ‘haptic representation’, see Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis, 2002), p. 6.  65. Uvedale Price advises the Beaumonts on gardening in The Letters of Uvedale Price, ed. Charles Watkins and Ben Cowell: The Sixty-eighth Volume of the Walpole Society (Leeds, 2006), pp. 176, 163. For the verses on ‘use with beauty’, see William Mason, Sonnet x, ‘To a gravel walk’, quoted in Charles Watkins and Ben Cowell, Uvedale Price (1747–1829): Decoding the Picturesque (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2012), p. 77; this book gives an excellent extended account of the whole controversy over the picturesque. 66. On moral versus picturesque ideas, see William Gilpin, Observations . . . Mountains, and Lakes of Cumberland, and Westmoreland (1786), vol. ii, p. 44.  68. Ruskin’s horror of Gower Street is in his ‘Of Modern Landscape’, in Modern Painters, part iv, ch. 16: Ruskin, Works, vol. v, p. 324. On nostalgia for Old England, see Ian Waites, Common Land in English Painting, 1700–1850 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2012), pp. 112–20. 69. On the ‘prevailing taste for irregularity’, see Richard Elsam, Hints for Improving the Condition of the Peasantry . . . Designs for Cottages (1816), p. 24. For Palmer on irregularity, see his letter to Leonard Rowe Valpy, 8 September 1878: R. Lister, ed., The Letters of Samuel Palmer (Oxford, 1974), vol. ii, pp. 956–7.  Repton discusses the two ‘Improvements’ pictures in his ‘Improvements’, in Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1816), pp. 193–4.

The ‘national look’ and ‘genuine English scenery’: Gainsborough and Constable 72. The ‘vulgar nature’ remarks come from ‘Hints to Professors of Landscape Painting’, Morning Post, c. 1780s: quoted in W. T. Whitley, Thomas Gainsborough (1915), p. 357. 72. Praise for Gainsborough’s ‘preferable school’ is in Henry Bale, ‘Mr Gainsborough’ (1788), cited ibid., p. 297. For Gainsborough’s love of the picturesque, see [W. H. Pyne], ‘Observations on the Rise and Progress of Painting in Water Colours’, Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce . . ., ix/49 (January 1813), p. 219.  73. Gainsborough’s ‘national look’ is discussed in Allan Cunningham, The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1829), vol. i, pp. 344–5. Debates on the interpretation of Gainsborough’s art are very usefully surveyed and critiqued in Elise L. 318

Notes and References, pp. 63–84 Smith, ‘“The Aged Pollard’s Shade”: Gainsborough’s “Landscape with Woodcutter and Milkmaid”’, Eighteenth-century Studies, xli/1 (Autumn 2007), pp. 17–39.  On Gainsborough’s Woodcutter and related paintings, see for example John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1850 (Cambridge, 1980); Michael Rosenthal, British Landscape Painting (Oxford, 1982), p. 32; and more recently Ian Waites, Common Land in English Painting, 1700–1850 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2012), pp. 47–9. 74. Ann Bermingham described Gainsborough’s landscapes as ‘highly ambivalent, on the one hand expressing a nostalgia for the older order, its small scale and relative naturalness, and on the other hand promoting a mode of perception that adjusts to the new’, in Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), p. 40. 75. Gainsborough’s comments on trees and figures occur in his letter to William Jackson, 23 August 1767, cited in Whitley, Thomas Gainsborough, p. 379.  77. De Wint’s ‘real English scenery’ is acclaimed in John Clare, ‘Essay on Landscape’ (?1825–37): J. W. and Anne Tibble, eds, The Prose of John Clare (1951), p. 212. Clare’s wish for a De Wint landscape comes in his letter to John Taylor, [October 1830–October 1831]: M. Storey, ed., The Letters of John Clare (Oxford, 1985), p. 552; the extra spacing and odd spellings are in the original. For Constable on Gainsborough, see Constable, letter to J. T. Smith, 18 August 1799: L. Parris, C. Shields and I. Fleming-Williams, eds, John Constable: Further Documents and Correspondence (Suffolk, 1975), p. 16.  Books by Gilpin and Price were in the Constable family library, and the copy of Price’s Essay had handwritten notes by Constable. See Constable, Further Documents, pp. 31 and 35.  78. For Constable’s remarks on the ‘Rural Scenery of England’, see his Introduction to Various Subjects of Landscape, Characteristic of English Scenery (London, 1833): in Andrew Wilton, Constable’s ‘English Landscape Scenery’ (1979), p. 24. Constable mentions ‘brother in landscape’ in a note to Peter De Wint, 6 May 1831: R. B. Beckett, ed., John Constable’s Correspondence (Suffolk, 1962–8), vol. iv, p. 310. 79. Constable’s ‘eye-salve’ remark is in his letter to John Fisher, 8 April 1826: ibid., vol. vi, p. 217.  81. For gypsies as part of England’s scenery, see William Howitt, The Rural Life of England (1838), vol. i, p. 219. For the presence of the gypsy in literature and art, see Sarah HoughtonWalker, Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period (Oxford, 2014), esp. ch. 7. 82. Richard Jefferies’s glimpse of the gypsy mother is in his ‘Hours of Spring’, in Field and Hedgerow, Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies, ‘Collected by His Widow’ (1889), pp. 10–11. For Constable sleeping with Claudes, see his letter to Maria Constable, 5 November 1823: Beckett, Correspondence, vol. ii, p. 296.  84. For Constable on Claude’s Goatherd, see his letter to John Fisher, 2 Nov­­ ember 1823: ibid., vol. vi, pp. 142–3. Price discusses ‘il riposo’ in Uvedale 319

a sweet view Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and On the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape (1796), p. 145. For his ‘healthfull breeze’, see Constable’s letter to John Fisher, 8 April 1826: Beckett, Correspondence, vol. vi, p. 216.  85. For Fuseli’s wish for an umbrella, see C. R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (1845), p. 79. The painting referred to is Constable’s Hampstead Heath, with the House Called ‘The Salt Box’ (c. 1818–20), at Tate Britain, London. For the wind-feel in Constable’s paintings, see Constable’s letter to John Fisher, 26 November 1825: Beckett, Correspondence, vol. vi, p. 211.  86. For Constable’s affection for dull subjects, see Anon., ‘The British Institution – No. ii’, London Magazine, New Series, iii (September 1825), vol. xiii, n.s. 3, pp. 49 and 67. Constable’s own comment on ‘under every hedge’ is in his letter to C. R. Leslie, 14 January 1832: Leslie, Memoirs, p. 222. On England, Constable and the ‘wealth of picturesque beauty’, see Richard and Samuel Redgrave, A Century of Painters of the English School (1866), p. 388. See also Stephen Daniels, ‘The Making of Constable Country, 1880–1940’, Landscape Research, xvi/2 (1991), pp. 9–17.

Chapter Three: The Domestication of Picturesque England, 1800–1860 87. Leslie Stephen’s ‘domestic English scenery’ comes in a letter of 18 August 1867: F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906), p. 197.

The Two Pictures and the ‘national look’ 89. For Smith’s love of The Task, see Charlotte Smith, ‘To William Cowper, Esq.’, in The Emigrants, A Poem (1793), p. vi.  90. Charlotte Smith’s ‘Beachy Head’ appears in Beachy Head: With Other Poems (1807); these lines are taken from pp. 21–4.  92. The pamphlet comparing France and England is The Two Pictures; or, A View of the Miseries of France Contrasted with the Blessings of England (1810). 93. War as ‘the making’ of Britain is discussed in Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707– 1837 (New Haven and London, 1992), p. 322.  The article reviewing ‘Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor’ and other publications on poverty and population appeared in Quarterly Review, xv (April–July 1816), pp. 187–235.  96. William Dickinson’s remarks on Cumberland improvements appear in his Essay on the Agriculture of East Cumberland (1853), pp. 10–11. There is a good account of the Price–Knight–Repton controversy in Stephen Daniels, Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England (New Haven and London, 1999), ch. 3. 97. Repton on Salvator Rosa 320

Notes and References, pp. 84–114 appears in his Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1816), p. 218. Repton’s relenting remarks on The Landscape appear ibid., pp. 33–4.  On ‘nucleated’ and dispersed villages, I am grateful to Hugh Cunningham (in conversation) for highlighting distinctions; see also Trevor Wild, Village England: A Social History of the Countryside (London and New York, 2004), pp. 37–44.  99. Thomas Miller’s description of Girtin’s ‘Woolwich’ is in his Turner and Girtin’s Picturesque Views of English, Scotch and Welsh Scenery, Sixty Years Since (1854), pp. 103–4.  100. For the ‘tight little island’ quotation, see ibid., p. 102. For Miller on the love of our fellow creatures, see ibid., p. 103. 101. Constable laments the old watermill in a letter to John Fisher, 12 November 1825: R. B. Beckett, ed., John Constable’s Correspondence (Suffolk, 1962–8), vol. vi, p. 207. 102. For the painter versus the farmer on the picturesque, see Somerset House Gazette, and Literary Museum . . ., i (1823–4), p. 329, and ii (1824), p. 317.

The foreign visitor’s view 104. The Scottish tourist on English scenery comes in Anon., ‘Letters from England’, Scots Magazine, 1 July 1818.  103. Quotations from Washington Irving’s ‘Rural Life in England’, from The Sketch-book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., are taken from the Longman’s edition (New York, London and Bombay, 1905); page numbers appear in the text beside each quotation.  108. William Howitt quotes Irving in his book The Rural Life of England (1838), vol. i, p. 12. 109. The reception of Sketch-book is summarized in R. H. Stoddard, ‘A Life of Washington Irving’, in The Works of Washington Irving (New York, 1885), vol. i, pp. xxii–xxiii. Ruskin on ‘cockney’ Dickens comes in his letter to W. H. Harrison, 6 June [1841]: Ruskin, Works, vol. xxxvi, p. 26.  110. The Old Curiosity Shop was published in weekly instalments, and reached a circulation of about 100,000 copies. Given the communal reading-aloud practices for popular serialized fiction, one can safely triple that number to get an idea of its actual readership.

English comfort, snugness and smallness 111. ‘V’, ‘English Landscape’ was published in the New Monthly Magazine, iv (1822), pp. 535–41.  113. Edmund Burke’s comments on beauty and submissiveness occur in Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), p. 212. 114. For Hazlitt on English comfort, see William Hazlitt, ‘Merry England’, in Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852), p. 65. The Sydney visitors’ comments are quoted in Journal of Voyages and Travels . . ., compiled by James Montgomery (New York, 1832), vol. ii, pp. 255–6. 321

a sweet view John Cam Hobhouse comments on English comfort in his A Journey through Albania . . . (Philadelphia, 1817), p. 47. For Ruskin on snugness and ‘well-principled housemaids’, see Modern Painters, part v, ch. 1: Ruskin, Works, vol. vi, pp. 13 and 15. For the ‘joyful nook of heaven’, see James Baldwin Brown, Young Men and Maidens. A Pastoral for the Times (1871), p. 39: quoted in Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven and London, 1957), p. 345.  117. For ‘parasitical sublimity’, see Ruskin, Works, vol. vi, p. 15.  119. On the old village church and manor house, see William Young, Picturesque Examples of Old English Churches and Cottages . . . (Birmingham, 1869): excerpted in Malcolm Andrews, ed., The Picturesque: Literary Sources and Documents (Robertsbridge, East Sussex, 1994), vol. iii, p. 233.

The purging of the old picturesque 119. Rogers’s comment on the shepherd boy is in C. P. Barbier, Samuel Rogers and William Gilpin: Their Friendship and Correspondence (Oxford, 1959), p. 22.  John Ruskin’s ‘happy walk’ is recorded in his diary entry for 11 May 1858: Modern Painters, vol. iv, ch. 1: Ruskin, Works, vol. vi, p. 20n. 121. Charles Dickens’s call for a new picturesque comes in his letter to John Forster, [11 February 1845]: K. Tillotson, ed., Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. iv (Oxford, 1977), p. 266. Dickens rebukes ‘hunters of the picturesque’ in his Pictures from Italy (1846), p. 240.

Chapter Four: ‘Going-in-itiveness’: Samuel Palmer’s English Pastoral The shepherd in the landscape 127. On Newbould’s use of the Times photo, see Nicholas Schoon, ‘Seeing Double’, Countryside Voice, Spring 2007, pp. 40–41.  128. Thomas Tickell’s article on pastoral was published in The Guardian, xxx (15 April 1713). 129. For Joseph Warton on pastoral, see his Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (1756), pp. 6–7. George Crabbe’s lines on Virgilian pastoral come from his poem The Village (1783), Book i, ll. 7–20: Howard Mills, ed., George Crabbe, Tales, 1812 and Other Selected Poems (Cambridge, 1967), p. 1. 131. For Constable on pastoral, see his letter to John Fisher, 17 December 1824: R. B. Beckett, ed., John Constable’s Correspondence (Suffolk, 1962–8), vol. vi, p. 185.  For Palmer on the Strephons and Chloes, see his essay on pastoral, ‘Some Observations on the Country and on Rural Poetry’, in An English Version of the Eclogues of Virgil (1883), p. 1. John Ruskin castigates stale pastoral in his lecture ‘Turner, and His Works’, in Works, vol. xii, p. 117. For photography’s renovation of

322

Notes and References, pp. 117–45 landscape art, see The Athenaeum, 1,472 (12 January 1856), p. 47.  133. For W. H. Hudson on the downland shepherd, see his Nature in Downland (1900), p. 123. ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ was published in Matthew Arnold, Poems (1853); the quoted extracts appear on p. 218. 134. On fears of degeneration, see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918 (Cambridge, 1989); and Bill Luckin, ‘Revisiting the Idea of Degeneration in Urban Britain, 1830–1900’, University of Bolton Institutional Repository (2006). Richard Jefferies remarks on the gamekeeper’s manliness in The Gamekeeper at Home (1910), p. 12.  135. For the review of Lawson’s Strayed, see ‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, The Times, 2 May 1878, p. 7.  136. For Palmer on ‘wax-jointed pipes’, see Palmer, Eclogues, p. 1.  138. The copy of Winter’s Day was sold for £160,000 at Bonhams in 2013. See www.bonhams.com (accessed May 2016). Millais and the sheep heads are mentioned in John Guille Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (1899), vol. i, p. 78.

The Virgilian muse and the railway whistle 138. For Palmer on classical subjects, see his letter to Laura Richmond, [?December 1862]: R. Lister, ed., The Letters of Samuel Palmer (Oxford, 1974), vol. ii, p. 672. Palmer’s wish to be photographed with his copy of Virgil is mentioned in William Vaughan, Samuel Palmer: Shadows on the Wall (New Haven and London, 2015), p. 343.  For Palmer on the ‘pastoral essence’, see his letter to Philip Gilbert Hamerton, 26 January 1872: Lister, Letters of Samuel Palmer, vol. ii, p. 835. Palmer’s wish to see pastoral as a ‘pleasure-ground’, a ‘natural link’ and an antidote to city ‘foulnesses’ is expressed in his An English Version of the Eclogues of Virgil (1883), pp. 5–6.  143. Geoffrey Grigson’s comment on Palmer and Blake is in his Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years (1947), p. 33.  15. For Palmer on dells and nooks, see A. H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter and Etcher (1892), p. 15. 144. Palmer used the phrase ‘valley of vision’ several times, for example in a letter to George Richmond from Shoreham, 14 November 1827: Lister, Letters of Samuel Palmer, vol. i, p. 15. The ‘railway whistle’ comment is in Palmer’s letter to ?William Linnell, 29 January 1862: ibid., vol. ii, p. 636.  On Palmer’s reading in the mystics, see Grigson, Samuel Palmer, ch. 5. Palmer mentions his ‘male lethargy’ in a letter to ?Leonard Rowe Valpy [23 June 1880]: Lister, Letters of Samuel Palmer, vol. ii, p. 1012. 145. The lines from Fletcher come from John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess, Act i, Sc. 3, ll. 27–33. The ‘Kingdom within’ quotation is Edward Calvert’s, quoted in Vaughan, Samuel Palmer, p. 117. There is an excellent discussion of Palmer’s conflicted rural idyll and contemporary rural reality in Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), pp. 284–303.  Palmer’s ‘love’ of 323

a sweet view British peasantry and support for the ‘old high tories’ are expressed in a letter to George Richmond, September/October 1828: Lister, Letters of Samuel Palmer, vol. i, p. 37. For Palmer’s comments on the ‘Radical Reformers’, see his ‘An Address to the Electors of West Kent, by an Elector’, Maidstone Gazette, 11 December 1832: in Palmer, Life and Letters, p. 147. 146. Palmer’s comments on the ‘little polity’ and the ‘subdivisions of labour’ are in Palmer, Eclogues, pp. 4 and 6. Palmer’s admiration for Unto This Last is mentioned in a letter to Laura Richmond, [?December 1862]: Lister, Letters of Samuel Palmer, vol. ii, p. 673.  The ‘knowing’ peasantry are so described in Washington Irving’s sketch ‘Christmas Day’, in The Sketch-book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (New York, London and Bombay, 1905). 147. Palmer’s remarks on Hogs and Poets are in a letter to Laura Richmond, [?December 1862]: Lister, Letters of Samuel Palmer, vol. ii, p. 672.

Blake, Linnell and the Dulwich sentiment 147. Palmer reflects on Blake’s ‘bucolic sentiment’ in his letter to Philip Gilbert Hamerton, 26 January 1872: R. Lister, ed., The Letters of Samuel Palmer (Oxford, 1974), vol. ii, p. 835.  148. For Palmer’s rapturous response to the ‘dreamy glimmer’ and so on in Blake’s woodcuts, see A. H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter and Etcher (1892), pp. 15–16. For Palmer’s account of Shoreham and the ‘perfumed’ twilight, see his letter to George Richmond, 14 November 1827; Lister, Letters of Samuel Palmer, vol. i, p. 16. The mention of ‘Dulwich sentiment’ occurs in Samuel Palmer: The Sketchbook of 1824, ed. Martin Butlin (London and Suffolk, 2005), ms p. 7. Blake’s vision of angels in trees is in Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake (1907), p. 7. Palmer’s ‘mystic glimmer’ note is in Butlin, Sketchbook of 1824, ms pp. 81–2. 150. Palmer’s making ‘the ideal probable’ comes in his letter to Leonard Rowe Valpy, [May 1875]: Lister, Letters of Samuel Palmer, vol. ii, p. 911. For F. G. Stephens on Palmer and Arcadia, see Athenaeum, 1,800 (26 April 1862), p. 567. 149. Palmer’s Dulwich ‘Paradise’ note is from Butlin, Sketchbook of 1824, ms pp. 81–2.  151. On a picture’s being ‘between a thing and a thought’, see Palmer’s letter to Mrs Anne Gilchrist, 27 June 1862: Lister, Letters of Samuel Palmer, vol. ii, p. 661. For Coleridge’s comment, see Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1886), entry for 30 August 1827, p. 49. 152. Palmer’s comments on ‘Buonaroti’s [sic] Moses’ are from his letter to John Linnell, ‘Wednesday Septembr. 1824’: Lister, Letters of Samuel Palmer, vol. i, p. 7.  Palmer’s ‘a thousand a year’ prospects are mentioned in his letter to George Richmond, ‘Sept.[–Oct] 1828: ibid., vol. i, p. 36.  151. Palmer describes the Lullingstone oaks in a letter to John Linnell, 21 December 1828: ibid., vol. i, pp. 47–8. Palmer’s refusal to become a ‘naturalist’ 324

Notes and References, pp. 146–63 occurs in his letter to George Richmond, ‘Sept.[–Oct] 1828: ibid., vol. i, p. 36.  154. Richard Jefferies’s comment on orange moss is quoted in Walter Besant, The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies (1905), p. 175.  On Palmer’s loaded brush, see Palmer, Life and Letters, p. 76. The ‘rising moon’ comment is ibid., p. 113. On Nature versus ‘Imaginative Art’, see Palmer’s letter to John Linnell, 21 December 1828: Lister, Letters of Samuel Palmer, vol. i, p. 47. 155. Palmer on that ‘genuine village’ comes in his letter to ?Philip Gilbert Hamerton, 4 August 1879: ibid., vol. ii, p. 970.

English scenery and ‘going-in-itiveness’ 155. For ‘aerial perspective’, see ‘From Palmer’s Notebooks, 1824–1835’, in The Parting Light: Selected Writings of Samuel Palmer, ed. M. Abley (Manchester, 1985), p. 110.  156. For Palmer on the Surrey ‘sand-banks’, see his letter to James Clarke Hook, May 1863: R. Lister, ed., The Letters of Samuel Palmer (Oxford, 1974), vol. ii, p. 680.  157. On Claude’s knolls, see Palmer’s letter to Leonard Rowe Valpy, May 1875: ibid., vol. ii, p. 912. For Palmer on ‘simple of style’, see A. H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter and Etcher (1892), p. 15. Palmer’s idea of ‘poetic compression’ is quoted by his son A. H. Palmer in the Preface to Palmer, An English Version of the Eclogues of Virgil (1883), p. x.  158. Palmer’s comments on the ‘apparent richness’ of Kent and Devon, and the ‘Northern twilight’, come in his letter to Elizabeth Linnell, 8 July 1838: Lister, Letters of Samuel Palmer, vol. i, p. 155. On the ‘garden’d labyrinths of Kent’, see Palmer’s letter to Mrs Linnell, in a composite letter 4–13 August 1838: ibid., vol. i, pp. 175–6. ‘Going-in-itiveness’ is quoted in Palmer, Life and Letters, p. 113.  159. On the art of ‘stillness’, see Palmer’s letter to George and Julia Richmond, 5 June 1836: Lister, Letters of Samuel Palmer, vol. i, p. 79. For Palmer on Fra Angelico, see his letter to Leonard Rowe Valpy, September 1868: ibid., vol. ii, p. 785. Palmer’s remarks on the Redgrave drawing are in his letter to Richard Redgrave, ?2 and 3 March 1876: ibid., vol. ii, p. 928. For Uvedale Price on ‘intricacy’, see his Essays on the Picturesque (1810), vol. i, p. 89.  160. For Palmer’s description of the ‘clump of cottages’ etc., see Samuel Palmer: The Sketchbook of 1824, ed. Martin Butlin (London and Suffolk, 2005), ms, p. 2.  162. Palmer on the ‘breaking out of village-fever’ comes in his letter to ?Philip Gilbert Hamerton, 4 August 1879: Lister, Letters of Samuel Palmer, vol. ii, p. 970.  163. The ‘increasing gloom’ and ‘wooded nest’ descriptions are in Palmer’s letter to Leonard Rowe Valpy, ?July 1864: ibid., vol. ii, p. 699. ‘Unutterable going-in-itiveness’ is mentioned in Palmer’s letter to Leonard Rowe Valpy, 6 November 1867: ibid., vol. ii, p. 764.  33. For the Bellman in Bond Street, see Palmer’s letter to Philip Gilbert Hamerton, 13 October 1879: ibid., vol. ii, p. 974. 325

a sweet view Chapter Five: Myles Birket Foster and the Surrey Scene 167. For Samuel Palmer’s comments on Surrey air, soil and climate, see his letter to Anne Gilchrist, February 1862: R. Lister, ed., The Letters of Samuel Palmer (Oxford, 1974), vol. ii, p. 641. On his riding by ‘overhanging orchards’, see his letter to James Clarke Hook, May 1863: ibid., vol. ii, p. 680. Palmer’s ‘ideal of scenery’ was mentioned by A. H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter and Etcher (1892), p. 234n. 

The Surrey Hills and the wild bank 168. The Art Journal’s comments on picturesque Surrey are in ‘Review of the County of Surrey: Its History, Antiquities, and Topog­raphy’, Art Journal, iv (1865), p. 260. The popularity of Kent and Surrey for painters is recorded in Peter Howard, Landscapes: The Artists’ Vision (1991), p. 98 and Appendix 3. The branding of ‘John Linnell’s Country’ is in Art Journal, liv (1892), p. 301.  170. George Eliot’s description of Witley is from her journal, 11 December 1886, quoted in J. W. Cross, George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals (New York, 1885), vol. iii, p. 215. Ruskin’s remarks on the ‘nursery-maid’s paradise’ occur in the Addendum to his lecture ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ (November 1853): Ruskin, Works, vol. xii, p. 161; see also W. James, ed., The Order of Release: The Story of John Ruskin, Effie Gray and John Everett Millais (New York, 1947), p. 176.  On Ruskin’s disgust with English ‘neatnesses’, see Ruskin, Works, vol. vi, pp. 13–15. 171. Charlotte Brontë reacts to Jane Austen in her letter to G. H. Lewes, 12 January 1848: M. Smith, ed., The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. ii (Oxford, 2000), p. 10. On ‘Ancient Country­ side’, see Oliver Rackham, The Illustrated History of the Countryside (1994), pp. 8–10. Surrey’s commons are discussed in Richard Heath, ‘Surrey Commons’, Golden Hours, 1872: reprinted in Richard Heath, The Victorian Peasant, ed. K. Dockray (Gloucester and New York, 1989), p. 75.  On Surrey’s changing woodland, see Rackham, Country­ side, p. 144. 172. Charles Keene’s comments on ‘bosky-copsy’ Witley occur in his letter of 26 January 1865, quoted in H. M. Cundall, Birket Foster r.w.s. (1906), p. 164.  174. Cundall’s comments on Witley are ibid., pp. 132–3.  175. The description of Foster’s house and pine and heather surrounds occurs in Anon., ‘Mr Birket Foster at Home’, New­­ castle Courant, 21 October 1887, p. 2. The roof tiles remark is from Cundall, Birket Foster, p. 148. On the Surrey labourers and their wages, see Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service (2008), p. 102. Palmer’s mention of the cost of land comes in his letter to Anne Gilchrist, [2] February 1862: Lister, Letters of Samuel Palmer, vol. ii, p. 641. On the exodus of farm labourers, see 326

Notes and References, pp. 167–89 Jan Marsh, Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England, 1880–1914 (2010), pp. 3–4, 61. Gertrude Jekyll remembers early Surrey in her Old West Surrey: Some Notes and Memories (1904), p. viii.  176. On the landlord’s cottage redevelopment and Helen Allingham’s exhib­ ition, see Marcus Huish, Happy England as Painted by Helen Allingham, r.w.s. (1903), pp. 127–8, 70. For the replacement of English oak, see Jekyll, Old West Surrey, p. 6. William Morris criticizes Surrey country­ side in a letter to Lady Georgiana Burne-Jones, 23 August 1882: quoted in Ina Taylor, Helen Allingham’s England (2000), p. 68. On rural England as ‘dormitory’ and so on, see Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1993), p. 43.  177. Foster’s ‘twenty guineas’ comment is recorded in Brothers Dalziel, A Record of Fifty Years’ Work (1901), p. 149.  On the ‘picturesque vernacular’, see Paul Readman, Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2018), ch. 6, especially pp. 271–8. For Shaw’s ‘rusophobe’ comments, see George Bernard Shaw, ‘A Sunday on the Surrey Hills’, Pall Mall Gazette, 28 April 1888, pp. 2–3.  178. A full description of The Hill’s interior is given in Jan Reynolds, Birket Foster (1984), ch. 10. For the description of The Hill’s gardens and wild bank, see Anon., ‘Mr Birket Foster at Home’, p. 2; also Marcus Huish, Birket Foster r.w.s. (1890 – Art Journal Christmas Supplement), pp. 140–41. 179. Samuel Palmer’s cry of ‘respectability’ occurs in Palmer, Life and Letters, p. 106.  180. Ruskin on Croxted Lane is in his ‘Fiction – Fair and Foul’, in Ruskin, Works, vol. xxxiv, pp. 265–7.

Broken foregrounds and the ‘leafy style’ 182. Gilpin comments on foregrounds in his Remarks on Forest Scenery (1791), vol. ii, p. 199.  Ruskin discusses foreground motifs in Works, vol. xiv, p. 109.  183. Landells’s instructions to Foster are quoted in Jan Reynolds, Birket Foster (1984), pp. 15, 17.  185. On the almshouses in Lane Scene, see Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service (2008), p. 102. The Art Journal’s criticism of Lane Scene is quoted in Reynolds, Birket Foster, p. 108.  186. Tennyson’s query is recorded in H. M. Cundall, Birket Foster r.w.s. (1906), p. 133. Foster quoted on Swiss scenery is ibid., pp. 73–4. William Gilpin’s remarks on roughness are in his Essay i: On Picturesque Beauty, from Three Essays (1792). 187. For Birket’s watercolour technique and ‘leafy’ style, see Reynolds, Birket Foster, pp. 62–3.  The ‘micro-mosaic’ description occurs in The Spectator, 5 May 1860, p. 20. 188. On Foster’s pencil-like watercolour technique, see ‘The Royal Academy and Other Exhibitions’, Blackwood’s Magazine, July 1860, p. 74. 189. The suggestion that Foster plants the viewer in Eden occurs in Charles Pearce, ‘Birket Foster and His Works’, Art Journal, New Series, iii (1877), p. 195. 327

a sweet view Pictures of English landscape 190. For the ‘last works’ declaration, see the Preface to Birket Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape, with Pictures in Words by Tom Taylor (1863), n.p. On Tennyson’s declining to write the text, see Brothers Dalziel, A Record of Fifty Years’ Work (1901), p. 143.  193. Foster’s comment ‘near perfection’ is quoted in Jan Reynolds, Birket Foster (1984), p. 193. The proofs for Pictures of English Landscape, with handwritten comments by Foster, are in the British Museum, London. 194. William Howitt’s description of old footpaths comes in his Book of the Seasons; or, The Calendar of Nature (1831), pp. 234–5.  196. For Palmer on ‘Yahoo-sheds’, see his letter to ?Miss Frances Redgrave, ? November 1864: R. Lister, ed., The Letters of Samuel Palmer (Oxford, 1974), vol. ii, p. 719.  200. For the ‘nook’ as sanctuary, see Ford Madox Ford, No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction (1929), quoted in Ian Jeffrey, The British Landscape, 1920– 1950 (1984), p. 10. For Henry James’s remark on Foster, see his English Hours (1905), p. 312. The ‘cooling shadows’ of ‘Green Lane’ are praised in ‘Review of Pictures of English Landscape’, Lincolnshire Chronicle, 26 December 1862.  201. Ruskin’s comments on Pictures are quoted in Reynolds, Birket Foster, p. 85.  202. Taste for Turner versus Foster is discussed in George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (New York, 1903), pp. 153–4.

Chapter Six: Writing English Scenery: Richard Jefferies 203. Leslie Stephen on loving the country ‘in books’ comes in his ‘Country Books’, in Hours in a Library (1892), vol. iii, p. 175. William Howitt’s remarks on books penetrating the city come in his Book of the Seasons; or, The Calendar of Nature (1831), pp. xvii–xviii.  For Stephen’s ‘magicians of the shelf’, see his Hours, vol. iii, p. 177.

‘A countryside of the mind’ 205. For Edward Thomas’s encounter with the watercress seller, see his The Heart of England (1906), pp. 11–15.  Jefferies writes on the forgetting of hedge flowers in Nature near London [1883] (2012), p. 152. The ‘country­ side of the mind’ is mentioned in Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge, 1981), p. 182, n. 36.  206. On ‘golden ages’ and ‘inventing’ the countryside, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973), and Donna Landry, The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking and Ecology in English Literature, 1671–1831 (Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2001).  207. For Constable on Londoners and country life, see his letter to John Fisher, 1 April 1821: 328

Notes and References, pp. 187–219 R. B. Beckett, ed., John Constable’s Correspondence (Suffolk, 1962–8), vol. vi, p. 65.  208. For Jefferies on sculpted water, see ‘Summer in Somerset’, in his Field and Hedgerow, Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies, ‘Collected by His Widow’ (1889), p. 267; on ‘sappy rushes’, ‘The Pageant of Summer’, in Life of the Fields (1884), p. 41; and on the dandelion, ‘Nature and Books’, in Field and Hedgerow, p. 20. 209. For Besant on ‘street-struck creatures’, see Walter Besant, The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies (1905), pp. 167–8.

Wild life and the picturesque compromise 211. For Leslie Stephen on a countryside of ‘reconciliation’, see his Hours in a Library (1892), vol. iii, p. 197.  212–13. For Mary Russell Mitford on her ‘thoroughly English village’, see Our Village (1879), p. 164; and on wildness and cultivation, ibid., pp. 42–3. See also Ian Waites, Common Land in English Painting, 1700–1850 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2012), pp. 115–17.  214. For Leslie Stephen on the gypsy, see his Hours, vol. iii, p. 198.  For the gypsy as ‘distant Orient’, see Jefferies, Field and Hedgerow, Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies, ‘Collected by His Widow’ (1889), p. 160. For an interesting study of the gypsy presence in English culture, see Sarah Houghton-Walker, Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period (Oxford, 2014). 215. On nature as undulating, see Jefferies, Field and Hedgerow, p. 51. For Barthes on the picturesque, see Roland Barthes, ‘The Blue Guide’, in Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers (New York, 1973), p. 74. On the ‘social mill’, see Stephen, Hours, vol. iii, p. 183.

Writings from ‘the borderline of nature’ 217. Anthony Trollope’s ‘A Walk in a Wood’ (1879) is reprinted in N. Shrimpton, ed., Anthony Trollope: An Autobiography and Other Writings (Oxford, 2014), p. 269. Jefferies on ‘the borderline of nature’ is in his Wild Life in a Southern County (1879), p. vii.  217. On Jefferies and Thomas Hardy, see Roger Ebbatson, ‘Hardy and Richard Jefferies’, Thomas Hardy Society Annual Review (1976). On Jefferies and the London marketplace, see Lynne Hapgood, Margins of Desire: The Suburbs in Fiction and Culture, 1880–1925 (Manchester, 2005), p. 64.  On ‘Nature’s school’, see Walter Besant, The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies (1905), pp. 45–6.  218. Jefferies’s surprise at the bird life near London is mentioned in his Nature near London (1887), p. iii.  219. On Jefferies’s Tolworth home, see P. K. Robins, ‘Richard Jefferies at Tolworth’, Richard Jefferies Society Journal, vi (1997). For Jefferies and London’s magnetism, see his Nature near London, p. 26.

329

a sweet view A language for writing nature 220. Thoreau’s discussion of words and earthy roots comes in his essay ‘Walking’, in Excursions (Boston, ma, 1863), p. 194. Jefferies’s remark on his language ‘incompetence’ comes in his Field and Hedgerow, Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies, ‘Collected by His Widow’ (1889), pp. 20–21.  For the relationship between North and Jefferies, see S. P. Milton, ‘John William North and Richard Jefferies’ (record of a talk to the Richard Jefferies Society, December 2003), published at www. southwilts.com (accessed 17 February 2020). 221. North’s tribute to Jefferies is in John William North, ‘The Late Richard Jefferies’, Pall Mall Gazette, 16 August 1887. For collaboration between the two, see Jefferies’s essay ‘Summer in Somerset’, published in English Illustrated Magazine, October 1887, with some half-dozen illustrations by North. For Edward Thomas on Jefferies’s language, see his Richard Jefferies ([1909]: later edition 1978), p. 327.  222. On books that ‘hold’ the outdoors world, see G. Grigson, ed., The Journals of George Sturt ‘George Bourne’, 1890–1902 (1961), p. 34. Palmer on ‘picture-fields’ comes from his letter to C. W. Cope, 22 June 1880: R. Lister, ed., The Letters of Samuel Palmer (Oxford, 1974), vol. ii, p. 1011–12. For the ‘spell’ of Jefferies’s imagination, see P. Anderson Graham, Nature in Books (1891), p. 19.  224. The extract from Jefferies’s essay ‘Just before Winter’ comes from Jefferies, Field and Hedgerow, pp. 157–8. Quiller-Couch’s satire on Jefferies was published in The Critic, xx/609 (21 October 1893), and reprinted as ‘Externals’ in Quiller-Couch’s Adventures in Criticism (1896), pp. 224–5.  225. Anderson Graham defends Jefferies in P. Anderson Graham, ‘Round about Coate’, Art Journal, January 1893, p. 16. W. J. Keith on Jefferies’s ‘sense of nature’ is in Keith’s Richard Jefferies: A Critical Study (Toronto, 1965), p. 56. Jefferies on the flower, stalk and petal is in ‘The Pageant of Summer’, The Life of the Fields (1899), p. 45. Graham on impressionists comes in ‘Round about Coate’, p. 16.  226. For Cézanne on painting from nature, see Émile Bernard, ‘Some of Cézanne’s Opinions’, in Cézanne by Himself, ed. R. Kendall (2004), p. 203. Thomas’s comment on Jefferies’s emotion versus sight is in his Richard Jefferies, p. 221.

Writing the changing English scene 227. On the Kyrle Society and its Open Spaces Sub-committee, see Gillian Darley, Octavia Hill: A Life (1990), pp. 179–84.  On preserving the commons, see Naomi Millner, ‘A Politics of the Common . . .’, in Space, Power and the Commons, ed. S. Kirwan, L. Downey and J. Brigstocke (2016). 228. For Jefferies on the city’s penetration of the country, see his Nature near London (1887), p. 173.  Jefferies deplores the loss of native plants, ibid., p. 162. 229. On Jefferies’s books epitomizing ‘natural 330

Notes and References, pp. 221–41 England’, see W. E. Henley, Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation (1890), pp. 177–8. On England as a ‘congeries of streets’, see ibid., p. 178. 230. Jefferies discusses landscape painting and Turner in ‘Walks in the Wheat-fields’, in Richard Jefferies, Field and Hedgerow, Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies, Collected by His Widow (1889), p. 143.  231. On the machines conquered by the soil, see Jefferies, ‘Notes on Landscape Painting’, in The Life of the Fields (1884), p. 132.

Self and nature 231. Jefferies on nature as ‘ultra-human’ is in his The Story of My Heart (1883), p. 62. Monet discusses the motif in an interview in 1895, quoted in Paul Hayes Tucker et al., eds, Monet in the Twentieth Century (1999). For Jefferies on primeval man, see The Story of My Heart, p. 50. 232. Jefferies’s desire to make nature a part of himself is in his essay ‘The July Grass’, in Field and Hedgerow, Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies, ‘Collected by His Widow’ (1889), p. 40. For Wordsworth on the ‘spousal verse’, see his Prospectus to The Recluse in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, vol. v (Oxford, 1949), pp. 4, 5. 25. Jefferies’s last handwritten lines are quoted in J. W. North, ‘The Late Richard Jefferies’, Pall Mall Gazette, 16 August 1887.

Chapter Seven: English Rural Scenery: A Repertoire 235. On Victorian high pressure, see William R. Greg, ‘Life at High Pressure’, in Contemporary Review, xxv (December–May 1874–5), pp. 623–4.  236. On the Old and the New, see Thomas Carlyle, ‘Charac­ter­­ istics’, Edinburgh Review, liv (December 1831), p. 375.  William Morris’s comments on buildings and history come from his lecture ‘The Beauty of Life’ (1880): G.D.H. Cole, ed., William Morris: Prose, Verse, Lectures and Essays (New York, 1974), pp. 554–5. For Matthew Arnold’s remarks on Dickens’s London, see P. Collins, ed., Dickens: Interviews and Recollections (1981), vol. ii, p. 242. 237. P. H. Ditchfield’s remarks on the ‘stability’ of England come from his book The Charm of the English Village (1908), p. 2.  238. Henry James reflects on the ‘essence of England’ in his English Hours (1905), p. 312. 239. John Clare’s lines on old lanes are from his poem ‘Pleasant Places’, in The Rural Muse (1835), p. 162. For Henry James on the brown hamlet and so on, see English Hours, p. 312.

Echoing green and country churchyard 241. For the ‘sinking land’ diatribe and the lines on the village green, see Ebenezer Elliott, The Splendid Village: Corn Law Rhymes; and Other 331

a sweet view Poems (1833), pp. 15, 34.  247. On the disappearance of village greens, see Emma Griffin, England’s Revelry: A History of Popular Sports and Pastimes, 1660–1830 (Oxford, 2005), ch. 8.  249. P. H. Ditchfield’s comments on the village church come from his The Charm of the English Village (1908), p. 2.  251. For William Howitt’s remarks on the rural churchyard, see The Rural Life of England (1838), vol. ii, p. 359. 252. On the nineteenth-century editions of Gray’s Elegy, see ‘The Bicentenary of Gray’s “Elegy”’, Colby Quarterly, iii/1 (February 1951), pp. 1–20.

Footpaths to Old England: Lanes, stiles AND gates 256. On Chadwick and the labouring classes, see Hugh Cunningham, Time, Work and Leisure: Life Changes in England since 1700 (Manchester, 2014), p. 73. Octavia Hill’s descriptions of country footpaths came in a speech to the Commons Preservation Society, June 1888, quoted in Paul Readman, Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2018), p. 125.  257. For William Howitt’s paean to footpaths and lament at their loss, see his Book of the Seasons; or, The Calendar of Nature (1831), pp. 234–8.  258. The reviewer’s com­­ ments on the closing of footpaths come from ‘Snatches from the Seasons’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 97 (7 November 1835).  261. Jekyll’s comment on the old fences is in Gertrude Jekyll, Old West Surrey: Some Notes and Memories (1904), p. 25. 262. On the diorama, see Our Native Land; or, Illustrations of English Scenery, Diorama at the Gallery of Illus­ tration, Regent Street: described by T. Miller (1851), p. 9.  263. For John Clare on ‘Buonaparte’, see his poem ‘Remembrances’, in Selected Poems of John Clare, ed. James Reeves (1954), p. 80.  264. For Clare’s ‘Wood Pictures in Spring’, see E. Robinson and G. Summerfield, eds, Clare: Selected Poems and Prose (Oxford, 1966), p. 155.  265. Clare laments the loss of the old stile in his journal entry for 29 September 1824: J. W. and Anne Tibble, eds, The Prose of John Clare (1951), pp. 109–10.

‘Without hedges England would not be England’ 265. The quotation ‘Without hedges . . .’ is from Richard Jefferies’s ‘Notes on Landscape Painting’, in The Life of the Fields (1899), p. 140. Jefferies refers to hedges as ‘mines of beauty’ in ‘Marlborough Forest’, in The Hills and the Vale (1909), p. 27.  For the hedges as ‘ghosts’, see Oliver Rackham, The Illustrated History of the Countryside (1994), p. 72. 266. The Scottish visitor’s remarks are in ‘Letter from England’, Scots Magazine, 1 July 1818. For Frederick Law Olmsted’s descriptions of spring hedges, see his Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (New York, 1852), p. 87.  On the history of hedge-planting up to 1960, see David Lowenthal and Hugh C. Prince, ‘The English Landscape’, 332

Notes and References, pp. 247–84 Geographical Review, liv/3 (July 1964), p. 317. On the scale of enclosed land, see Simon Fairlie, ‘A Short History of Enclosure in Britain’, The Land, 7 (Summer 2009) at www.landmagazine.org.uk.  267. For Rackham on ‘Ancient Countryside’, see his Countryside, p. 4. Walter Besant’s remarks on hedge-learning are in his The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies (1905), pp. 167–8.  269. On the meadow-farmers and hedges, see Jefferies, The Life of the Fields, pp. 139–40.  For Jefferies on the screens of ‘twisted stone’ and the difficulty of picturing the hedge, see his ‘A King of Acres’, in The Hills and the Vale, pp. 93, 94. 269. On the ‘Goths’ and hedges, see Richard Jefferies, ‘Marlborough Forest’, ibid., p. 27.  270. Richard Jefferies’s remark on how much there is in a hedge comes in his ‘Notes on Landscape Painting’, in The Life of the Fields, p. 140; and on taste and the hedges, see his essay ‘Outside London’, in The Open Air (1885), p. 238.  272. On Helen Allingham’s choice of the hedge motif, see Marcus Huish, Happy England as Painted by Helen Allingham, r.w.s. (1903), p. 115. 273. Richard Jefferies on the writer and the complexity of the hedge is in his Round about a Great Estate (1880), p. 92; and on the challenge of the hedge for the artist, see The Open Air, p. 240.  28. For Jefferies’s complaint about the painter’s neglect of the hedge, see his ‘Outside London’, ibid., p. 244.

Chapter Eight: The Country Cottage 277. The cottage is acclaimed as the ‘essence’ of Old England in Stewart Dick, The Cottage Homes of England (1909), p. 277. 278. Richard Jefferies’s remarks on the cottager and the nation occur in his ‘Cottage Ideas’, in Field and Hedgerow, Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies, ‘Collected by his Widow’ (1889), p. 199.

The decline and fall of the English cottage 278. The Morning Chronicle’s cottage count was published in its issue of 8 March 1796. 279. For the comments on enclosures and pulling down cottages see David Davies, The Case of Labourers in Husbandry Stated and Considered (1795), p. 56. Thomas Bewick’s remarks on cottagers are in A Memoir of Thomas Bewick, Written by Himself, ed. Iain Baine (Oxford, 1975), p. 75.  280. On population increase in this period, see Trevor Wild, Village England: A Social History of the Countryside (London and New York, 2004), pp. 46–7.  The lines from Robert Southey’s ‘The Ruined Cottage’ are in Poems of Robert Southey, ed. M. H. Fitzgerald (Oxford, 1909), p. 415.  282. Thomas Rickman, The Fallen Cottage: A Poem (1786); line references appear in the text following each quotation.  284. The insistence on ‘naturalized’ garden decoration and the cottage description occur in Richard Payne Knight, The Landscape: A Didactic Poem (2nd 333

a sweet view edn, 1795), ll. 308–13, 290–94.  For Gainsborough on the ‘ragged family’, see Susan Sloman, Gainsborough in Bath (New Haven and London, 2002), p. 181. 285. On the interpretational controversies over the Woodcutter’s Return and other cottage paintings, see for example John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1850 (Cambridge, 1980), ch. 2; also Julius Bryant, Kenwood: Paintings in the Iveagh Bequest (New Haven, 2003), pp. 194–7. ‘D. W.’’s poem ‘On Seeing Mr Gainsborough’s pictures at Bath’ was published in Gentleman’s Magazine, December 1773, p. 614.  J. T. Smith’s praise of Gainsborough’s ‘cottagery’ occurs in his Remarks on Rural Scenery (1797), p. 7.  286. For Smith’s description of the ‘neglected cottage’, see ibid., pp. 9, 12.  289. John Ruskin recorded his Amiens walk in his diary entry for 11 May 1858, in Modern Painters, vol. iv, ch. 1: Ruskin, Works, vol. vi, p. 20.

The cottage in the landscape 290. On the ‘grown’ rather than built Lakeland cottages and their ‘vegetable garb’, see William Wordsworth, Guide to the Lakes [1835], ed. E. de Sélincourt (Oxford, 1977), pp. 62–3.  291. William Blake writes about his Felpham cottage in a letter of 21 September 1800: Geoffrey Keynes, ed., The Letters of William Blake (New York, 1956), p. 50.  Ruskin compares the English and French cottages in The Poetry of Architecture, Ruskin, Works, i, pp. 12–17. 292. For Ruskin on ‘well-principled housemaids’ and England’s ‘swept proprieties’, see Modern Painters, part v, ch. 1: Ruskin, Works, vi, pp. 13, 15.  294. Tom Taylor’s lines on ‘Old Cottages’ accompany plate xviii in Myles Birket Foster, Birket Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape, with Pictures in Words by Tom Taylor (1863).

Cottage revivalism and the woman’s domain 294. The lines on the English Cottage Home are in James Holroyde’s English Scenery. A New Poem (1885), p. 13.  295. The Britton Abbot pamphlet is entitled An Account of a Cottage and Garden near Tadcaster . . . Printed at the Desire of the Society for Bettering the Condition, and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor (1797), and he mentions the pleasures of neatness on p. 4.  296. Land grants to cottagers are commended in ‘Cottagers – Small Farmers’, Northampton Mercury, 31 August 1816. For the remark about ‘misplaced Gothic castles’, see Abbot, Account, p. 14, note e. James Malton’s description of the cottage’s ‘effect of chance’ is on the title page of his An Essay on British Architecture (1798); the description of its ‘inviting aspect’ is on p. 5.  Robinson’s recommendation to preserve the ‘ancient gabled Cottage’ comes in his Village 334

Notes and References, pp. 285–309 Architecture (1830), p. iii.  297.The Times’s report on philanthropy and ‘model cottages’ appeared on 11 November 1849, p. 5.  298. For Southey’s later remarks on his ‘Ruined Cottage’, see Southey’s Common-place Book (4th series, 1850), p. 95.  300. The rapid disappearance of cottages is discussed in Marcus Huish, Happy England as Painted by Helen Allingham, r.w.s. (1903), pp. 129–30.  301. Helen Allingham’s ‘old school’ style of painting and her view of the cottage as the ‘essence’ of Old English country life are discussed in Stewart Dick, The Cottage Homes of England (1909), pp. 276–7.

Epilogue: ‘A Haunt of Ancient Peace’ 303. For Frederic Harrison’s recollections of 1830s London, see his Autobiographic Memoirs (1911), vol. i, pp. 2, 19. 304. Kingsley on the National Gallery occurs in Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life, Edited by His Wife (1895), p. 68. For Constable on his ‘kingdom’, see his letter to John Fisher, 9 May 1823: R. B. Beckett, ed., John Constable’s Correspondence (Suffolk, 1962–8), vol. vii, p. 116. 305. On the landscape painter’s sunlight, see W. W. Fenn, ‘The Love of Landscape’, Art Journal, xliv (July 1882), pp. 199–200.  306. For Dante Gabriel Rossetti on Kelmscott, see his letter of 1871, quoted in Aylmer Vallance, The Art of William Morris (1897), p. 118.  307. For the Academy’s autumnal paintings, see Kenneth McConkey, Memory and Desire: Painting in Britain and Ireland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Farnham, Surrey, 2002), p. 66.  308. The connection between the mood of the late Victorian landscapes and the poor summers was suggested to me by Ian Waites.  309. North’s Blake titles are listed in Donato Esposito, Frederick Walker and the Idyllists (2017), p. 110.

335

Select Bibliography

(Place of publication is London, unless otherwise indicated.) Andrews, Malcolm, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Aldershot, Hampshire, 1989) Cundall, H. M., Birket Foster r.w.s. (1906) Daniels, Stephen, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge, Oxford and Boston, ma, 1993) Dick, Stewart, The Cottage Homes of England (1909) Ditchfield, P. H., The Charm of the English Village (1908) Esposito, Donato, Frederick Walker and the Idyllists (2017) Foster, Myles Birket, Birket Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape, with Pictures in Words by Tom Taylor (1863) (engraved by the Brothers Dalziel) Gilpin, William, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape (1792) Helsinger, Elizabeth K., Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815–1850 (Princeton, 1997) Hemingway, Andrew, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, 1992) Howitt, William, The Rural Life of England (1838) Huish, Marcus, Happy England as Painted by Helen Allingham, r.w.s. (1903) Jefferies, Richard, Field and Hedgerow, Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies, Collected by His Widow (1889) Keith, W. J., The Rural Tradition: A Study of the Non-fiction Prose Writers of the English Countryside (Toronto, 1974) 336

Select Bibliography Knoepflmacher, U. C., and G. B. Tennyson, eds, Nature and the Victorian Imagination (Oakland, 1977) Kriz, Kay Dian, The Idea of the English Landscape Painter: Genius as Alibi in the Early Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London, 1997) Palmer, Samuel, ‘Some Observations on the Country and on Rural Poetry’, in An English Version of the Eclogues of Virgil (1883) Price, Sir Uvedale, Essays on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and, On the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape (3 vols, 1810) Readman, Paul, Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2018) Reynolds, Jan, Birket Foster (1984) Sloman, Susan, Gainsborough in Bath (New Haven and London, 2002) Thomas, Edward, Richard Jefferies [1909] (1978) ——, The South Country [1909] (Wimborne Minster, Dorset, 2009) Vaughan, William, Samuel Palmer: Shadows on the Wall (New Haven and London, 2015) Waites, Ian, Common Land in English Painting, 1700–1850 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2012) Watkins, Charles, and Ben Cowell, Uvedale Price (1747–1829): Decoding the Picturesque (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2012) Wild, Trevor, Village England: A Social History of the Countryside (London and New York, 2004) Wilton, Andrew, Constable’s ‘English Landscape Scenery’ (1979)

337

Acknowledgements

For this book I am indebted to a great number of people. These are debts accumulated throughout my life, and now, alas, beyond the lifetime of some of my most valued creditors. First and foremost, my family have enabled this book (and it is dedicated to them): my Surrey grand­parents introduced my child self in the late 1940s to the cap­tivating scenery that this book explores; my parents reinforced its charms; my family, my friends and colleagues, encouraged the writing, read drafts, raised questions (which I’m still trying to answer); and my beloved wife, Kristin, not only bore with fortitude the book’s invasion of our retirement, but also became one of its key editors. I would particularly like to thank the following who supported the project in all sorts of ways: Stephen Bann, Michael Leaman, Leonee Ormond, Claude Piening of Sotheby’s, Ian Waites and an anonymous benefactor who contributed generously to the cost of the illus­­­trations. Beyond this group of encouragers there is an even larger body of collaborators – unwitting ones. The issues of landscape, national identity and the picturesque have been debated intensively over the last few decades, and generated a formidable literature. I have benefited hugely from the work of these historians, geographers, literary critics and art historians, especially because they have so often ‘slipped the surly bonds’ of disciplinary boundaries in order to expand their fields of vision. They will recognize their presence in the book, both in acknowledged quotation and maybe more pervasively. They may or may not approve the uses to which I put their ideas and arguments, but we move forward together, I hope. I could not have been more fortunate in my publishers. In particular Alex Ciobanu and Martha Jay have been throughout the book’s production responsive, genial and immensely helpful. 338

Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Marc Fitch Fund for awarding me a grant towards the cost of the illustrations. Finally, the following should be specially mentioned, with my profound gratitude, for their assiduous editorial help and advice in reading the whole book or substantial parts of it in its draft phases: Francis Andrews, Hugh Cunningham and Jeremy Tambling.

339

Photo Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Some locations of artworks are also given below, in the interest of brevity: The Amelia, Tunbridge Wells: 104; Art Institute of Chicago: 80; Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford: 2, 52, 62, 96; from Thomas Bernard, An Account of a Cottage and Garden, near Tadcaster (London, 1797), photo British Library, London: 123; from Walter Besant, Eulogy of Richard Jefferies, 4th impression (London, 1905), photo Robarts Library, University of Toronto: 85; from Birket Foster’s Pictures of English Landscape: Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel, with Pictures in Words by Tom Taylor (London, 1863), photos Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, ca: 76, 77, 79; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery: 129; photo courtesy Bonhams: 86; © Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives (gift from the Misses Spencer and Mrs Choules, 1950)/Bridgeman Images: 109; British Library, London: 22; The British Museum, London: 36, 63, 94, 102, 106, 112, 121; Brontë Parsonage Museum, photo courtesy The Brontë Society: 118; collection of the author: 44, 66; from H. M. Cundall, Birket Foster r.w.s. (London, 1906), photos Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, ca: 68, 70; The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire: 64, 65; from Charles Dickens, The Chimes: A Goblin Story . . . (London, 1845), photo University of California Libraries: 119; from Charles Dickens, Master Humphrey’s Clock, vol. ii (London, 1841), photo Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, ca: 38; from Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (London, 1846), photo University of California Libraries: 40; from Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (London, 1872), photo Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris: 46; Duke of Rutland, Belvoir Castle: 111; Dundee 340

Photo Acknowledgements Art Galleries and Museums, The Orchar Collection (Dundee City Council): 82; from Richard Earlom, Liber Veritatis; or, A Collection of Prints, after the Original Designs of Claude Le Lorrain, vol. ii (London, 1777), photo Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, ca: 6; from William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales (London, 1782), photo Cornell University Library, Ithaca, ny: 16; Godalming Museum Collection: 71, 107; Government Art Collection, London: 120; from Thomas Gray, An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: The Artists’ Edition (London, 1893), photo British Library, London: 95; from James Holroyde, English Scenery: A New Poem (London, 1885), photo British Library, London: 122; from Marcus B. Huish, Happy England as Painted by Helen Allingham, r.w.s. (London, 1909), photos Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, ut: 97 (Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery), 108 (private collection); Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest: 128; Imperial War Museum (iwm), London: 41, 87; from Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon Gent. – Artist’s Edition (New York, 1864), photo Library of Congress, Washington, dc: 37; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, ca: 17; Kingston History Centre: 83; Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne: 27; Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, dc: 33, 88; reproduced by kind permission of London Borough of Lambeth, Archives Department: 72; from Charles Mackay, ed., The Home Affections Pourtrayed by the Poets (London and New York, 1883), photo British Library, London: 75; Marylebone Cricket Club (mcc) Museum, London: 90; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 11, 51, 89; Minneapolis Institute of Art, mn: 92, 93, 124, 125; from Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village (London, 1879): 81; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York: 61; The Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading (sr cpre ph1/2/275): 42; National Army Museum, London: 4; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh: 31; The National Gallery, London: 32, 98, 99; The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth: 12; Norfolk Museums Service (Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery): 103; private collection: 14, 47, 67, 84, 108; from Humphry Repton, Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (London, 1816), photos Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, ca: 24, 25; from T. C. Rickman, The Fallen Cottage: A Poem (London, 1787), photo British Library, London: 113; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: 10; from Samuel Rogers, The Pleasures of Memory (London, 1855), photo University of California Libraries: 15; © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London/ Bridgeman Images: 100; Science Museum, London: 114; from John Thomas Smith, Remarks on Rural Scenery (London, 1797), photos Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, ca: 23, 116; photos courtesy Sotheby’s: 19, 20, 43, 50, 69, 110, 126, 127; Tate, London: 1, 8, 39, 45, 53, 74, 101, 341

a sweet view 115, 117; Victoria and Albert Museum, London: 3, 5, 18, 35, 58, 130, 131; Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire: 26; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, ct: 30 (Yale Art Gallery Collection, Gift of Mrs. John Archer Gee for History of Art), 34 (Yale Art Gallery Collection, Gift of Mr. Chauncey B. Tinker, b.a. 1899), 105 (Gift of Charles Isaacs and Carol Nigro);Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven, ct: 7, 9, 13, 21, 28, 29, 48, 49, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 91.

342

Index of Persons and Pictures

An Account of a Cottage and Garden, near Tadcaster (title page to Bernard) 295–6, 295 Aglionby, William 53 Alison, Archibald 44, 77 Allingham, Helen 10, 11, 63, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 182, 218, 237, 262, 267, 271, 272, 274, 275, 277, 299–302, 306 At the Garden Gate 301–2, 301 Night-jar Lane, Witley 255, 256 On the Pilgrims’ Way 271, 272 A Sussex Cottage 301, 301–2 View over Sandhill, Surrey 169, 170 Allingham, William 299 Arnold, Matthew 133, 146, 236 Austen, Jane 7, 15–20, 22, 23, 24, 29, 35, 41–2, 63, 89, 94–5, 96, 114, 118, 129, 170–71, 211, 254, 281, 290, 293, 308 Barrell, John 58 Barrett, George (the Younger) 252 Barry, James 34

Barthes, Roland 215, Batchelor, Thomas 57–8, 59, 85, Beaumont, Sir George, and Lady Beaumont 65, 82 Bedford, Francis, Goodrich Castle 51 Belloc, Hilaire 10 Berenson, Bernard 64 Besant, Walter 208–9, 217, 267–8, 305 Bewick, Thomas 183, 279 ‘The Deserted Village’ 279, 279 Blake, William 142–3, 147–9, 151, 154, 155, 158, 162, 163, 167, 245, 248, 291, 309 ‘The Blighted Corn’ 147–8, 147 ‘The Ecchoing Green’ 246, 245–6 ‘Sabrina’s Silvery Flood’ 147–8, 148 Böhme, Jakob 144 Boot, William Henry, ‘The Lane’ (from Mitford, Our Village) 211–13, 212 Borrow, George 204 Bree, William, A Much-repaired Gate 258–61, 261 343

a sweet view Brontë, Charlotte 19, 171, 287 Country Cottage 287, 288 Brown, Ford Madox 178 Brown, Lancelot (‘Capability’) 58–9, 63, 74, 96 Browne, Hablot Knight (‘Phiz’) ‘Nell tending the graves’ (from Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop) 110–11, 110 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward (Lord Lytton) 20–21 Bunyan, John 150 Burgess, Thomas 47 Burke, Edmund 22, 53, 112 Burne-Jones, Edward 17 Byron, Lord George Gordon 109, 114 Campbell, Thomas 109 Carlyle, Thomas 71, 119, 236 Cattermole, George 252 Cézanne, Paul 226, 231 Chadwick, Edwin 256 Clare, John 46, 48, 58, 76, 113, 238–9, 263–5 Claude (Lorrain) 25, 30, 33, 36, 63, 80, 82, 84, 85,104, 144, 157 ‘A Herdsman tending Cattle’ (Liber Veritatis) 25, 27, Clausen, George 242–4, 247, 248 A Wish 243, 242–5 Cobbett, William 241, 295 Cole, George Vicat 40 Harvest Time 40, 41 Cole, Henry 169, Coleman, William Stephen, illustration to The Pleasures of Memory (Rogers) 43–4, 45 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 11, 42, 151, 190, 281 Colley, Linda 93 Constable, John 35, 44, 48, 49, 72, 76–86, 101, 104, 130, 131, 344

146, 194, 207, 211, 248, 252, 258, 285, 304, 307 ‘Design for Thomas Gray’s Elegy, Stanza 5’ 252, 252 ‘East Bergholt, Suffolk’ 77–8, 79, ‘Landscape’ (The Cornfield) 49, 81, 82, 83, 194, 258, 259, 304 The Vale of Dedham 80, 80–81 Cotman, John Sell 31, 258 Drop Gate, Duncombe Park 258, 261 Cowper, William 22, 89 Crabbe, George 129 Crawford, Rachel 21 Creswick, Thomas, Landscape with Stream, Bridge and Cottage 273, 273 Cruikshank, George 91, 249–51, 269, 298–9, 300 The Bottle 249–51, 250, 298–9 London Going out of Town; or, The March of Bricks and Mortar! 269, 270 Cruikshank, Isaac 91 French Happiness – English Misery 91–2, 91 Cuitt, George An Old Halftimbered House in Chester 101, 103 Cundall, H. M. 173, 186 distant view of ‘The Hill’ 174–5, 174 Tigbourne Cottage, Witley 172, 172 Cunningham, Alan 73, 76 Dalziel (brothers), George and Edward 176, 190–91, 193, 201 Darwin, Charles 147 Davis, Henry William Banks, The Old Shepherd 130, 130 De Wint, Peter 31, 76, 77, 78

Index of Persons and Pictures Devis, Arthur 54, 67 The Duet 54, 56 The Reverend Thomas D’Oyly with His Wife, Henrietta Maria 54, 57 Dick, Stewart 300, 302 Dickens, Charles 24, 109–11, 119, 121, 167, 236, 237, 239, 287 Dickinson, William 96 Ditchfield, P. H. 237, 249 Doré, Gustave 134, 135, 251 ‘Ludgate Hill – A Block in the Street’ 134, 134–5, 251 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste (‘l’Abbé Du Bos’) 34 ‘D.W.’ 285 Dyer, John 283 Earl of Radnor’s farm buildings, Coleshill Farm, Berkshire 196–7, 196 East, Alfred, A Haunt of Ancient Peace 306, 306 Eliot, George (pen name of Mary Ann Evans) 168–70, 171, 174, 176, 213–14 Elliott, Ebenezer 240–41, 279 Elsam, Richard 69 Emerson, Peter Henry, In Dove Dale (Staffordshire Side) 204, 204 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 19 Etty, William 86 Faraday, Michael 86 Farquharson, Joseph, The Shortening Winter’s Day Is Near a Close 137–8, 137 Fenn, William Wilthew 305 Fielding, Copley 252 Fletcher, John 144–5, 163 Ford, Ford Madox 200 foreground woodland scene (photograph) 183, 183

Foster, Myles Birket 9, 10, 11, 63, 126, 168, 170, 171–202, 203, 213, 222, 227, 237, 239, 245, 248, 252, 258, 262, 267, 271, 293, 299 ‘At the Brook-side’ 198, 199–200 The Cottage 173, 173 ‘Domestic Peace’ 190, 190 ‘The Farm-yard’ 194–7, 195 Gathering Lilacs 271, 270 ‘The Green Lane’ 191–4, 192, 258 The Hill 178, 177 Lane Scene at Hambledon 184–6, 184–5, 187 ‘A Very Bower of Roses’ 294, 294 The Village Oak 234, 245 Fra Angelico 159 Fuseli, Henry 88 Gainsborough, Thomas 35, 59–62, 72–7, 81, 86, 87, 88, 91, 101, 159, 258, 277, 284–5 The Cottage Door 60, 59–60 Landscape with a Woodcutter Courting a Milkmaid 73, 74, 75–6 Peasant Ploughing with Two Horses 73–4, 75 Study of an Old Hurdle 258–61, 260 The Woodcutter’s Return 276, 284–5 Gaskell, Elizabeth 237–8 Gibbon, Edward 283 Gilchrist, Anne (wife of Alexander) 167, 175 Gilpin, William 21, 25, 26, 36–8, 39–40, 41, 42, 48, 50–54, 60, 66, 74, 77, 87, 90, 94, 95, 96, 345

a sweet view 106, 111, 115, 157, 158, 182, 186–8, 194, 244, 285 View of Goodrich Castle 50, 58 Gillray, James 91 Girtin, Thomas 31, 97–8, 100 ‘Woolwich’ (engr. John Walker) 97–100, 98 Gissing, George 201–2 Goldsmith, Oliver 27, 62, 240, 257, 279, 281 Gosse, Edmund 252 Graham, Peter Anderson 224–5 Gray, Thomas 199, 252–3, 283 Gregg, William 235 Grigson, Geoffrey 143 Hallam, Arthur Henry 215 Hand, Thomas, Cottage and Hilly Landscape 116–17, 117 Hapgood, Lynne 217 Hardy, Thomas 128, 132, 206, 217, 218, 299 Harford, John 297 Harris, Jose 176 Harrison, Frederic 303 Hart, William ‘English Rural Scene’ 104, 105 Havell, William 14, 27–8 Tintern Abbey (detail) 14, 27 Hazlitt, William 21, 44, 113, Hearne, Thomas 31, 33, 284 Raglan Castle, Monmouthshire 33, 34 A Vine-clad Cottage 284, 284 Henley, William Ernest 229 Hill, Octavia 227, 256 Hobhouse, John 114 Holroyde, James 294 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 220 Hoskins, W. G. 248 Howitt, William 19, 81, 108, 194, 203–4, 251, 256–58 Howitt, William and Mary 51 Hudson, W. H. 132–3 346

Hughes, Arthur 254–5 Home from Sea 254, 254–5 Huish, Marcus 175, 176, 188, 272, 274, 300 Hume, David 45 Hunt, Leigh 35 Hunt, William Henry 188, 201 Hunt, William Holman 168, 219 Inchbald, John William 131, 138 A Shepherd on the Downs 131–2, 133 A Study, in March (In Early Spring) 140, 141 Irving, Washington 102, 104–11, 114, 115, 146 James, Henry 200, 238–40 Jefferies, Richard 9, 17, 81, 126, 134, 154, 168, 203, 205–32, 265, 267–70, 271, 272–3, 278, 305 Jekyll, Gertrude 170, 175, 261–2 Keene, Charles 172 Keith, W. J. 225 Kingsley, Charles 303–4 Knight, Richard Payne 55, 96–7, 283–4 Kris, Kay Dian 20, 45–6 Lambert, George 29 View of Box Hill, Surrey 29, 29 Landells, Ebenezer 183 Landry, Donna 206 Lawson, Cecil Gordon 134, 135 Strayed – A Moonlight Pastoral 134–5, 135 Leader, Benjamin Williams 307–8 February, Fill Dyke 307–8, 307 Leslie, Charles Robert 84–5, 104 Lewes, George Henry 168–9

Index of Persons and Pictures Lindsay, David (Earl of Crawford and Balcarres) 23, 24 Linnell, John 151, 152, 154, 168 Linnell, William 144 Lock, William 29 Lockhart, John Gibson 109 Loutherbourg, Philippe-Jacques de 283, 290 Coalbrookdale by Night 282, 283 Cottage in Patterdale, Westmoreland 289, 290 Lowenthal, David 38 Lydgate, John 155, 157 Macbeth, Robert Walker, Gypsy Girl 213–14, 214 McConkey, Kenneth 307 Macfarlane, Robert 220 McKillop, Alan 47 Malton, James 296 Marks, Laura 64 Marshall, William 55, 63 Martini, Pietro Anonio 31, 32 The Exhibition of the Royal Academy 31, 32 Mason, William 65–6 Michelangelo 152 Middleton, John, Alby, Norfolk 262 Millais, John Everett 138, 168, 170, 190–91, 201, 219 Miller, Thomas 97–100, 101 Milton, John 27, 111–12, 161, 162–3, 257, 309 Mitford, Mary Russell 203, 211–13 Monet, Claude 231 Monro, Thomas 31 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu 34

Morland, George 81 Morris, William 24, 47, 176, 178, 236, 262, 306 Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company 178 Nash, John 297 Newbould, Frank 126–8, 131, 138, 241, 245, 247, 248 Your britain – fight for it now (South Downs) 124, 125–8, 131 Your britain – fight for it now (village green) 241–2, 242, 245, 247, 248 Newman, Gerald 20 North, John William 221, 224, 225, 274–5, 308–11 1914 in England 308–11, 310 ‘The Bat Begins with Giddy Wing’ – Barley Field over the Hedge 274–5, 274–5 When Winter’s Wasteful Spite Was Almost Spent 221, 222, 224 Olmsted, Frederick Law 40–41, 265–6 Paine, Thomas 281 Palmer, Alfred Herbert 154, 167–8, 179 Palmer, Samuel 9, 63, 69, 121, 125–6, 128, 130, 131, 135, 136, 138, 142–65, 167, 168, 175, 179, 189, 193, 196, 200, 211, 216, 222, 227, 232, 248, 305, 306, 308–11 Ancient Trees, Lullingstone Park 152, 152 The Bellman 160–65, 161, 164, 189, 193, 305 Christmas (Folding the Last Sheep) 136–7, 136, 158, 306 347

a sweet view

Coming from Evening Church 142, 162 Cornfield and Church by Moonlight 248–9, 249 ‘Cottage in a Cornfield’ 159– 60, 160 A Cow Lodge with a Mossy Roof 154, 153 Early Morning 155–8, 156 The Herdsman’s Cottage 136–7, 136 In a Shoreham Garden 154, 308–11, 309 ‘Landscape with Woman Reclining against a Tree’ 150, 151 Pear Tree in a Walled Garden 154, 153 Shoreham, Kent 142–3, 143 ‘The Vintage’ (illus. to Dickens’s Pictures from Italy) 120, 121 Philips, Ambrose 147 Plymley, Joseph 58, 59, 60–61, 63 Pocklington, Joseph 290 Polwhele, Richard 46 Pomfret, John 245 Pope, Alexander 52, 129 Pott, Joseph 30, 36 Poussin, Nicolas, and Gaspard Poussin (Dughet) 25, 30 Pre-Raphaelites 65, 138, 150, 235, 275 Price, Sir Uvedale 59, 61–5, 74, 77, 82, 84, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96–7, 111, 119, 159, 179 Prince, Hugh 38 Pugin, Augustus Welby 71, 197, 235 Pyne, William Henry 36, 101 Quiller-Couch, Arthur 224, 244 348

Rackham, Oliver 171, 265, 267 Read, Herbert 23 Readman, Paul 10, 19, 177 Redgrave, Richard 159 Rembrandt van Rijn 63 Repton, Humphry 20, 23, 28, 52, 65, 70–71, 96–7 ‘Improvements’ (from Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening) 70, 70–71 Reynolds, Jan 187 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 53–4, 59, 64, 72 Richards, William T. (engr. Arthur Richards), ‘Beneath that Yew-tree’s Shade’ 253–4, 253 Richmond, George 148, 152 Rickman, Thomas Clio 281–3, 289, 294 Robinson, Henry Peach, A Gleaner 262, 263 Robinson, Peter Frederick 102, 296–7 Robinson, William 228 Rogers, Samuel 43–4, 46, 119, 244–5 The Pleasures of Memory (illus. by William Stephen Coleman) 43, 45 Rosa, Salvator 29, 95, 96, 97 The Hermit (etching by Joseph Wood) 95 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 178, 306 Rowlandson, Thomas 33 The Country House 18 Exhibition of Water Coloured Drawings, Old Bond Street 31–2, 33 Royal Academy 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 44, 48, 49, 53, 72, 80, 137, 141, 168, 307, 309 Rubens, Peter Paul 63

Index of Persons and Pictures Ruskin, John 67–9, 109, 110, 113, 114, 116–17, 118, 119, 131, 146, 170, 179–81, 182, 201, 227, 236, 262, 287, 289, 291–93, 297

Strudwick, William, Croxted Lane, West Dulwich 179–81, 181 Sturt, George (‘George Bourne’) 222

Sandby, Thomas, A View of Boxhill from Norbury Park, Surrey 29, 30 Scott, John 27–8 Scott, Sir Walter 98, 109 Shadbolt, George, Mt Pleasant Fields, Hornsey 268, 269 Shakespeare, William 130, 230 Shaw, George Bernard 177–8 Shayer, Charles Walker, Village Cricket in the New Forest, Brockenhurst 247–8, 247 Smith, Charlotte 89–91, 95 Smith, George, Hop Pickers outside a Cottage 28, 29 Smith, J. T. 35, 68, 76–7, 78, 80, 285–87 ‘Lady Plomer’s Palace’ 68, 68 ‘Near Battle Bridge, Middx’ 285, 286 A Sketching Lesson at a Cottage Door 287, 287 Smith, John ‘Warwick’ (engr. James Merigot), Pocklington’s Island, Keswick Lake 290, 290 Southey, Robert 24, 280, 281, 298 Stamp, Dudley 248 Stanfield, Clarkson 86 ‘Will Fern’s Cottage’, The Chimes (Dickens) 287, 288 Stephen, Leslie 87, 104, 110, 203–4, 206, 207, 210–11, 214, 215, 257 Stephens, Frederic George 150 Strachan, Arthur Claude 299

Talleyrand-Perigord, CharlesMaurice de 21 Taylor, John 76 Taylor, Tom 191, 196, 197, 293–4, 298 Taylor, William (‘of Norwich’) 52–3 Taylor, William Benjamin Sarsfield 34–5 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 169, 186, 190–91, 209–10, 214, 215, 231, 305–6 Teresa of Ávila (St Teresa), 144 Thomas, Edward 127, 205, 221, 226 Thomson, James 10, 26, 84, 257 Thoreau, Henry David 220 Thornton, Robert John 148 Tickell, Thomas 128–9, Trollope, Anthony 216, Turner, J.M.W. 31, 36, 78, 97, 119, 131, 170, 188, 201–2, 230 ‘Arundel Castle and Town, Sussex’ 78, 79 Varley, John 31 Landscape with Harlech Castle and Snowden in the Background 25, 26 Virgil 26, 29, 128, 129, 131, 138–9, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148 Waites, Ian 22, 58 Walpole, Horace 28–9, 30 Walton, Izaak 204 Warton, Joseph 129 Watkins, John and Charles, Samuel Palmer 139, 139 349

a sweet view Webb, Philip 236 Wells, H. G. 7–8, 10, 38, 52 Wiener, Martin 206 Williams, Raymond 206 Wilson, Charles Edward 299 Wilson, Richard 73, 88 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 34, 35 Woolf, Virginia 87 Wotton, Sir Henry 52 Wordsworth, William 86, 129–30, 141–2, 227, 232, 264, 280, 281, 289–91 Wright of Derby, Joseph, Derwent Water, with Skiddaw in the Distance 37 Wyld, James (engr. Nathaniel Rogers Hewitt), plan of St Giles and Bloomsbury 67–8, 67 Young, William 118

350